Fact: Canada is alone among major industrialized powers without its own car. The U.S. has Ford, GM, and so on. Italy has Fiat. Japan has Honda and Toyota. Germany has Volkswagen. France has Citroen. Jaguar and Bentley (and plenty of others) first started in Britain. Korea has Hyundai. Even Russia has its Lada. But Canada? Nothing.
Back in 2008-09, when the Harper government was debating if it should use billions of Canadian tax dollars to prop up the Canadian divisions of the foreign-owned car companies GM and Chrysler, there was — too briefly, if you ask me — a flurry of nationalist murmurings that the Canadian government should do no such thing but instead, use those billions to develop Canada's first car. The Beaver? the Paddle? The Canoe? Oh, the branding possibilities!
But nothing ever came of that chatter. The government did what everyone expected and gave billions went to GM and Chrysler (and taxpayers made a tidy little sum on the deal). And though Canada still builds lots of Toyotas and Fords and KIAs, we still don't have our own car.
The yearning to have Canada create its own car, though, was more than just nationalism, there were some reasonable arguments about the research and manufacturing spinoffs that would accrue to Canada if we had our own car.
And so it was (and is) with India where, in 2009, leading industrialist Tata Group announced that Tata Motors would build and sell the Nano, the world's cheapest car. This would sweep through India (environmentalists were worried about millions of new car drivers putting greenhouse gases into our already overburdened atmosphere) and the rest of the developing world. India could boast of its own car, bringing new wealth and expertise to that country and, in the process, creating a car for the masses in the developing world.
But, as the American Enterprise Institute's Sadanand Dhume told me today, so far, it's not exactly working out for Tata's Nano — mostly because status-conscious Indians don't want to be driving what everyone knows is “the world's cheapest car.”
And here's the link to Dhume's excellent piece in Foreign Policy about Tata's Nano