Cobbler Cancels Nano Booking

Last year, a man called Maruti booked a Nano. He doesn’t want it anymore.

Forty-five-year-old Maruti Bhandari has graced this exact space before. Last July, the Mumbai-based cobbler became a nano-celebrity when he booked himself a Tata Nano LX. His cobbler-becomes-car owner story was the perfect public relations spiel for the potential of the ‘People’s Car’. But less than a year later, the tale has taken a wrong turn. Maruti has cancelled his booking. “Those cars are all burning,” he says.

Last year, as the first batches of customers began to receive their one-lakh wonders, there were at least three reported incidents of Nano cars that ‘self-ignited’. The company says the cars were only ‘smoking’. Tata Motors investigated all complaints and blamed the smoke on faulty combination switches located behind the cars’ steering wheels. “The cars were repaired within 24 hours and the customers were delighted with the performance of their cars, and we changed the supplier of the combination switches,” says Debasis Ray, corporate communications chief at Tata Motors.

However, folks like Maruti took note. He cancelled his booking in December last year, citing safety concerns. Late last month, Maruti’s precautionary move was vindicated when a brand new Nano, just out of the showroom and on its way home, reportedly burst into flames along a Mumbai highway. (The car manufacturer is still investigating this case of an exploding Nano, but points out that these are ‘one-off incidents’ among at least 30,000 cars already delivered.)

Despite the fact that he has no car to show for his efforts, Maruti’s life has changed irrevocably since last year. Though Tata Motors reimbursed his booking fee of Rs 1.4 lakh in February, Maruti says he lost several months’ worth of bank interest. Plus, there’s the ignominy. “Everyone just keeps asking me ‘where is your car’ and I’m sick and tired of answering that question. It’s quite embarrassing.”

Even if he hadn’t cancelled the booking, Maruti’s dream of owning a Nano would have taken longer than he expected because his name didn’t figure in the computer-drawn list of 100,000 people who will receive the car by end-2010. It seems a Nano was just not meant to come into the life of a man called Maruti.

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Manju Sara Rajan