There are thousands of articles on the world wide web talking about getting maximum mileage out of your car. Just like the millions of car owners that wanted to get the most mileage out of their cars, I was reading through dozens of ‘how to’ articles on ‘hypermiling’. Hypermiling is a term coined by Wayne Gerdes, and hypermilers are those drivers striving to exceed the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) fuel economy rating of their vehicles.

I’m not going to talk about the cars and their mileage efficiencies in the US and Europe, but in a country like India where one cannot exceed 35-60 kmph inside congested city roads. Also, enormous traffic jams that happen due to the callous..

I work for an IT company with thousands of employees; with 4-level parking space that can accommodate about 2500 to 3000 cars. One day, as usual, when I parked my car in the second-level basement, I was glancing at and scanning the rows of cars gleaming under the bright fluorescent lamps - AND counting the number of TATA cars that I could spot in 5 rows. Being a market analyst, I was a little shaken by the negligible number of TATA cars in all of the four rows that I considered. I wanted to do a small informal survey to contain my curiosity, with just four questions on a sample size of 47..

There are quite a few in my office who own diesel-powered cars and the street price of these cars are close to nine lakh rupees! It’s sad to realize the fact that they will be paying lesser than most of those unfortunate middle-class people who yearned to own a car, putting a major portion of their savings on a good small petrol car. This is the kind of discrepancy that arises in a society that is neither entirely capitalist nor communist. The capitalist oil companies would want the government to…

The best way to start car pooling is among your colleagues. You’ll obviously know who’s coming from the same area as yours, and if you don’t try communicating using the internal messaging medium like corporate instant messenger or mailing groups. This is basically the trust factor, and it works most of the time; a colleague would be more comfortable traveling with you (or vice versa) than traveling with a stranger interested in car pooling. This principle applies very much to women who will not take the risk of commuting with a stranger who had advertised for car pooling.

In India, especially southern India, we’ve more than 320 days of bright sunlight, and most of the solar-driven appliances do not need direct sunlight…

I used to discuss with my dad and also with my friends that Tata would really deserve such praise from the international community if he had striven hard to bring us a cheap car that runs on alternate fuel, which sadly is not the fact. Well, I would say, Nano received just too much praise and exposure that it deserves.

I was just reading an interesting (and funny) article (NDTV.com) about TATA’s Nano and what it means to our billion plus population. The tile of the article is Nano: Firing a billion dreams, and I believe it is pointing to our country’s population. Firstly, more than 25% of the 1 billion are categorized under ‘below poverty line’ and another 25% as ‘middle class’. TATA’s Nano does fire a few million dreams (about 250 million if you consider just the middle class population which is by any terms HUGE!), and according …

The unveiling of TATA’s Rs. 1,00,000 car at the auto expo in New Delhi has made many raise their eyebrows, and also an equal number to frown. There has been a lot of debate on this world’s cheapest car from three sections of the society, viz., the lower-middle class, the environmentalists and the car’s competitors (majority are bike manufacturers in India). At this point, I had a very interesting discussion with my colleagues who are a mix of middle class and lower-middle class heavily taxed citizens of our country.

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