It's Tuesday morning and the streets of Bangalore are, as always, jammed with traffic and saturated with smog. A young tech worker and his pregnant wife navigate the dusty roads on a tiny scooter, a 125-cc Hero Honda. Srinivasan Chandra's hands sweat onto the handlebars as he waits for the light to turn green. The journey from home to office is only 6 miles, but road conditions and rush hour have turned the four-lane highway into a cross between a parking lot and a demolition derby. Still in her first trimester, his wife sits sidesaddle on the vinyl seat and adjusts her sari so it won't get caught in the wheel. Srinivasan eyes the Yamaha alongside him and calculates his next move. If he guns the throttle just before the light turns green, he might get a jump on the other guy and swerve around a nasty-looking pothole ahead to make the next light. But if he's too slow off the mark, or if the Yamaha doesn't give ground, he might bottom out on the pothole. "One mistake and we lose our baby to the road," he says. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Too proud to ride a bus, too poor to buy a car, risking life and limb to keep moving forward — Srinivasan is the perfect reflection of modern India. Yes, he's enjoying the tech boom that is slowly boosting the country's standard of living. But the promise of middle-class comforts — or even a safe morning commute — remains a distant dream for him and most other people here. For more, visit wired.com/video Promotional video from Tata Motors. Now that dream may be closer to reality. In January, at New Delhi's Auto Expo, Tata Motors introduced a bubble-shaped car called the Nano. Integrating sleek curves, a roomy interior, and a small but powerful engine, the vehicle has a shockingly low price: less than $3,000. When the Nano arrives at dealerships in India late this year, it will be the cheapest car ever made, a four-seat family ride for the price of an upmarket laptop. Middle-class household incomes in India start at roughly $6,000 a year, so a $3,000 car is the kind of innovation that could create millions of new drivers. Eight million Indians currently own cars, according to the Mumbai-based credit-rating agency Crisil. Another 18 million have the means to buy one. However, the Nano could increase that pool of potential auto owners by as much as 65 percent, to 30 million, the organization reports. "This goes beyond economics and class," says Ravi Kant, managing director of Tata Motors. "This crosses the urban-rural divide. Now a car is within the reach of people who never imagined they would own a car. It's a triumph for our company. And for India." India is just the beginning. Tata Motors is the fifth-largest manufacturer of medium and heavy trucks in the world, boasting an international distribution network and $7.2 billion in revenue last year. The global market for the Nano and similarly low-priced cars could be immense — the World Bank counts more than 800 million people who earn between $3,600 and $11,0000 annually. In India, the new vehicle could change the taxi business overnight and energize a cadre of small-time entrepreneurs by providing new levels of mobility, carrying capacity, and social status. At the same time, the prospect of a flood of additional cars terrifies city planners and environmentalists. Metropolises throughout the developing world are expanding at breakneck speed. In many places, the crumbling roads are already crammed beyond capacity. Traffic fatalities are on the rise, and air pollution threatens to choke remaining pockets of green space. Sure, a single Nano is a step toward independence, security, and social mobility — but to some observers, millions of Nanos spell apocalypse.

It takes almost an hour for Srinivasan to negotiate the traffic to his wife's office. By the time he arrives at the IT center where he manages a small team designing ads for mobile phones, his white shirt is gray with dust. He shows his ID badge to the security guards and makes his way through a sea of cubicles to his desk. He boots up his computer and taps an email to coworkers: He wants to know how to join the waiting list to buy a Nano. Girish Wagh is a short, unassuming man, but the 500 people on his team give him a wide berth in the hallway of the Tata Motors factory in the western city of Pune. The lead engineer on the Nano project, he's not accustomed to talking to the press. He clasps his hands nervously as he acknowledges that it won't be easy to convince potential customers that a car can be both ridiculously inexpensive and seriously solid. Early reports erroneously said the body would be made of plastic. "Can you believe it?" he says. "At the expos, people actually began tapping on it to see if it was made of metal." I cross the word plastic off of my list of questions. The Tata Group is the General Electric of India, a sprawling conglomerate with a commanding presence in media, telecom, outsourcing, retailing, and real estate. Started in 1868 as a textile wholesaler, the company branched out into luxury hotels after, as legend has it, founder Jamsetji Tata was turned away from a posh establishment because of his skin color. In 1945, a few years before the British left India, Tata started producing locomotives and, eventually, autos. In 1998, Tata Motors introduced the country's first indigenously designed car. The homegrown Indica, which now sells for around $6,000, became ubiquitous as a taxi. Meanwhile, the Tata Group has been expanding globally. It bought the tea company Tetley in 2000 and acquired Anglo-Dutch steel giant Corus last year. It maintains Tata Consultancy Services offices in 54 countries and owns hotels in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. In March, Tata Motors bought Jaguar and Land Rover. Division head Ravi Kant says the company will start exporting Nanos "in the next few years," possibly sooner if the car gets an enthusiastic reception domestically. Where to? He's not saying, but Africa, South America, and Europe are probably on the short list. Ratan Tata, the company's chair and the great-grandson of Jamsetji, got the idea for the Nano when he was — what else — sitting in traffic. One morning a few years ago, he was battling Mumbai's gridlock when he noticed a single scooter carrying an entire family. Suddenly it struck him: The poor driver and his passengers represented not just a vast social need but an immense market opportunity. The success of the Indica gave him the confidence to try to tap it. The Nano wholesales for 1 lakh, or 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500 plus taxes and shipping, which dealers are expected to mark up to around $3,000). The number carries a symbolic weight as the minimum amount for a major life purchase, and that's the price Ratan envisioned when he set out to build the world's most affordable automobile. India's next-cheapest car, the bare-bones Suzuki Maruti 800, is twice the price at 2.1 lakh. Even India's iconic auto-rickshaw, a three-wheeled death trap made of metal and canvas, costs roughly 1 lakh. When it comes to keeping the price down, Tata Motors starts with major advantages. Labor, raw materials, facilities — all cost far less in India than in Detroit. And it doesn't hurt to be part of the country's most powerful industrial combine. Tata Steel's plant is just a couple of hundred miles from Tata Motors' West Bengal manufacturing plant — a proximity that further cuts costs. But Wagh says the supply chain is only part of the equation. His team scrutinized every detail with expense in mind. They quickly dispensed with AC, radio, and passenger-side mirror. "We calculated every bolt fitting and sheet metal casing," he says. "We had multiple variations for every aspect of the car and calculated them against the price." While every automaker factors cost into the equation, overruns are common. For Tata, intent on hitting the 1 lakh price point, overruns weren't an option.

A major factor was weight. The final design stands at 1,322 pounds, 528 pounds lighter than the flyweight Honda Insight. To power it, the engineers settled on a 33-horsepower, 623-cc, two-cylinder engine housed in the rear; to service it, the mechanic must remove a set of bolts in the 5.4-cubic-foot trunk. The payoff: an uncommonly efficient 47 miles per gallon running at top speed (65 mph). But that doesn't mean Nano owners won't spend a lot of time pumping gas — the minuscule tank holds just 3.9 gallons. Wagh's team is also examining the way cars get to dealers. One plan is to export Nanos as kits that snap together like Legos, a strategy that might save money by multiplying the number of vehicles that fit into a shipping container. Cars would then be assembled and spot-welded on arrival. Wagh tries to convince me that local workshops can put together Nanos without sacrificing quality, but when I continue to ask questions, he gives up. "Perhaps it's time we see the car," he says. The Engineering Research Centre is a megawarehouse that holds most of Tata Motors' test equipment. The building is off-limits to outsiders; employees are forbidden to talk about what happens inside, even to one another. Wagh leads me down a wide corridor past the Thermocube, a car-sized chamber that replicates the extremes of India's climate. Then he pushes open the door to a garage containing a small white vehicle, the same prototype displayed at the auto show in Delhi. It looks like a cross between a Smart car and George Jetson's rocket pod. Wagh tells me it's about to take a spin on the Buzz, Squeal, and Rattle Machine, a device that simulates India's pothole-riddled byways by pounding the wheels with hydraulic pistons. "Too long on the Buzz, Squeal, and Rattle and a poorly constructed car will fall to pieces," he says. This one looks as though it has already been through a few rounds of testing. The rearview mirror rests on the dashboard. Sections of the interior have been dissected and hastily reassembled. The engineers won't let me take it for a test run, but I'm allowed to settle into the driver's seat. The pedals feel good under my feet, and I imagine working them as I dodge Pune traffic. Since the engine is tucked next to the rear axle, I can comfortably fit my 6' 2" frame behind the controls. That's unusual for any Indian car, let alone a cheap one. And that's when it hits me. I had expected something like a matchbox with a motor. But this is a real vehicle. More than that, it's a cool machine. My reaction is visceral: I want one. And that's precisely the response the Tata Group is counting on. The Nano is the kind of product that transforms a company from a massive global conglomerate into a massively cool global conglomerate. The company won't give me an estimate of demand for Nanos, but analysts agree that it will be huge. The credit-rating firm Crisil reckons that the vehicle could single-handedly boost total Indian car sales by 20 percent (up from 1.2 million between early 2007 and early 2008) if Tata can keep up with demand. But that's not likely; the factory in West Bengal can produce only 250,000 units in the first year. (Ford turns out 173,000 budget-priced Focuses annually in the US.) Ratan Tata recently acknowledged the possibility of shortfalls but said that the company would consider outsourcing its manufacturing to meet demand. Either way, Tata's baby signals a new era in automotive history. From the backseat of a beat-up Indica, this street in downtown Bangalore doesn't look four lanes wide. Fruit stalls, parked vehicles, and scrap from construction sites crowd it into a single convoluted passage. My taxi driver weaves through an endless stream of motorcycles, scooters, auto-rickshaws, and oxcarts. On the side of the road, a small boy wearing a blue school shirt and supersize Lion King backpack squints at the traffic, looking for his chance to break across. He takes three quick steps forward before he sees my taxi, jumping back just as the driver swerves into oncoming traffic. I turn around and see that he's unfazed, waiting for his next opportunity to cross.

The problem isn't just the sheer number of vehicles but the fact that India's roads make no provision for people on foot. Everyone shares the same narrow strip of concrete — with lethal consequences. In 2004, there were 92,618 traffic fatalities in India, a mortality rate of 14 per 10,000 vehicles. In developed countries, the rate hovers around 2 per 10,000 vehicles. Pedestrians account for the largest number of deaths, while drivers of two-wheelers rank second. The numbers drop for people in cars, though autos and trucks are involved in roughly 80 percent of accidents. In other words, you're safer in a car but also far more dangerous to others. And the number of cars is only going to rise as owners of two-wheelers upgrade. Sales of two-wheelers dropped nearly 9 percent between 2007 and 2008, while auto sales climbed more than 10 percent. Experts estimate that congestion costs Bangaloreans $1.8 billion a year in fuel and vehicle maintenance alone, and the roadways are already packed. Gridlock isn't the worst problem — air quality is bound to take a precipitous dive. "The car itself is fuel efficient, but the city is already at emergency levels in terms of air and noise pollution," says Leo Saldanha, director of the Bangalore-based Environmental Support Group. The Nano is designed to be clean. Its engine releases about 193 grams of carbon per mile, on a par with European requirements. But low emissions is not the same as no emissions. The state pollution control board rang alarm bells in 2006, when it detected dangerous levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and other nasty chemicals in the air. Clouds of suspended particles found their way into hospital wards. And while a thick haze from vehicle exhaust and improperly regulated industry hangs over Bangalore, climatologists are more worried about the dark smudge that hovers a couple of miles above most of the region. Called the Asian Brown Cloud, it comprises the combined airborne detritus of the continent's developing economies. Adding more vehicles won't help. "In the 20th century, America learned that cars offer huge advantages for moving people around," says Nancy Kete, director of Embarq, an urban transport think tank. "But those benefits came with costs in terms of congestion, pollution, and road accidents because of poor planning. In the 21st century, we know what the problems are. India doesn't need to repeat the mistakes of the past." The question is how to avoid them. India's haphazard route to development has left gaping holes in environmental and urban policies, and the number of cars on the road has increased steadily over the past decade. Its cities are traffic-jammed, exhaust-choked nightmares even without the Nano. But that growth puts the Nano at the heart of an emerging debate. Should India embrace a future where every man, woman, and child owns a carbon-spewing, space-hogging, four-wheeled vehicle? Or should cities focus their efforts on public transportation systems that reserve private ownership as a luxury? Some experts believe the country can handle more cars. "The problem isn't traffic," says Ashwin Mahesh, a tech guru and former NASA climatologist who now lives in Bangalore. "It's that no one knows how to manage all the cars." His company, Mapunity, is located on a campus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management — a sort of Harvard Business School for the South Asian crowd. The lobby of his building is packed with students in sharp black business suits, but Mahesh shows up in shorts and a T-shirt. It's an outfit that screams geek bravado. Mahesh cofounded Mapunity in December 2006 to devise solutions to urban traffic. Recently, his company partnered with India's largest cell phone network, Bharti Airtel, to gain access to records of every transaction on its system. Cell phones constantly relay data to local towers even when they're not in use, so Mapunity can track the location of as many as 3 million Bangaloreans in real time, giving the company a minute-by- minute snapshot of the city's traffic. When too many people crowd a given intersection, a red dot shows up on a map posted on the company's Web site.

In his office, Mahesh taps on the screen in front of him, displaying the route from my hotel to his office. It's a string of red dots, bumper to bumper. One block west, though, the streets are empty. "If we planned the traffic flow a little better, we could use the excess capacity on the empty road to free up the one that's clogged," he says. His point is simple: The congestion on Bangalore's streets isn't necessarily the result of too many cars but of a failure to manage that traffic properly. Still, capacity will eventually become an issue. And Mapunity's efforts do nothing about pollution or carbon emissions. For that, you can hope for either technological revolution in zero-emission cars or a reduction in the number of vehicles on the road. But how do you deny a safer, more comfortable ride to 30 million upwardly mobile Indians like Srinivasan Chandra, ferrying his pregnant wife on a Hero Honda scooter? Some urban planners dream of a Bangalore where congestion taxes and state-of-the-art public transit systems discourage people from using their cars. It's the kind of vision that looks better on a think-tank drawing board than on the ground. For one thing, building better bus routes and bike lanes would require large-scale government intervention, and the Indian government moves glacially. As a legacy of the British colonial system, generalist administrators rotate through different departments during their career. They're expert managers, but they rarely have the knowledge to tackle specialized problems. In Bangalore and throughout the surrounding state of Karnataka, the person in charge of managing traffic is Gaurav Gupta, commissioner of urban land transport. He apologizes for arriving at our meeting two hours late. Traffic, he says. His department's offices are disquietingly empty, with a few pieces of cheap furniture and only one computer. The man working on it doesn't seem to know how to touch-type. The city has a transportation plan, Gupta tells me, but progress has been slow and piecemeal. "Indian cities are just not designed for motorized transport," he says. He lists several proposed improvements: an aboveground rail corridor, new bus routes, and parking lots. His voice trails off. He sounds like he doesn't believe in his own plan. As for the Nano, he's philosophical. "When the printing press came to Europe and everyone could suddenly buy a Bible, people in the church thought it would be the end of religion. They were wrong. This is just like the Nano. It will make cars affordable to many more people, and critics are scared. But we will adjust. That is the way it has always been." Back at Tata Motors, the mood is jubilant as the top brass anticipates the Nano's launch. Stretching out in a leather chair in his office, Ravi Kant rubs his hands on the knees of his pin-striped suit. "A lot of people blame the carmakers for pollution and congestion," he says. "But the truth is that if the environmentalists' worst fears were realized and people bought a couple of million Nanos to replace their outdated cars and motorcycles, there would be less pollution." He has a point. Other Indian vehicles lack catalytic converters and belch the full spectrum of auto exhaust, mostly as a function of age and engine size. If the vehicles currently on the road were replaced by Nanos, air quality might well improve. Nanos will certainly replace some scooters, but they'll also dramatically increase the number of vehicles on the road overall. People who never dreamed they could own a car will start saving their pennies, up-and-comers who would have bought one will buy two, and entrepreneurs will invest in fleets. Now that Tata Motors has shown the way, competitors are scrambling to offer their own budget vehicles. Hyundai has announced a $3,700 car. Renault-Nissan has teamed with Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj to put 400,000 of its own ultra-low-cost cars on the road by 2011. General Motors is rumored to be working on a Nano-killer with China's Wuling Automotive. A decade hence, millions of ultra-low-cost vehicles will crowd narrow alleyways throughout the world. Thus, what happens in Bangalore will presage changes to come in Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, and Budapest. The Asian Brown Cloud will likely obscure an ever greater region of the sky.