The World's Cheapest Car
One of the biggest problems about buying a car is that you often have to borrow a lot of money so that you can pay for one. In most cases new cars cost tens of thousands of dollars, a price that not everyone can afford.
In India car maker Tata Motors have brought out the cheapest car in the world: the Nano, first introduced in 2008. It costs only 2,500 dollars plus taxes. Tata director sees the Nano as a "People's Car", designed especially for India's lower middle classes, those who earn less than 200 dollars a month.
India makes about 1.2 million cars a year and the idea of a cheap car for everyone makes some experts sceptical. More cars lead to more traffic and more pollution, which also contributes to global warming.
One of the biggest trends in producing cars today is keeping them small so you can find a parking space quickly, running them with as little petrol as possible and having room for as many people as possible. This is exactly what the Nano combines. It is only 3 metres long and 1.6 metres tall but it still has four doors and room for five people.
The car is lightweight, the parts are glued together and there is only one windshied wiper instead of two. The Nano has a 30 horsepower engine and a four-speed manual transmission, found at the back of the car, like the legendary VW Beetle. It reaches speeds of up to 100 km an hour and needs about 2 gallons of fuel per 100 miles.
At 2,500 dollars you will only be able to buy the basic model of the Nano, without any extras. Air conditioning and other additional features would raise the price by about 4,000 dollars.
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Words
- additional =more than normal, extra
- afford = to have enough money so that you can pay for something
- basic = very simple, without any extras
- borrow = to lend money and give it back later
- contribute = to help make something happen
- design = make
- earn = the money you get when you work
- engine = motor
- especially = mostly for
- feature = here: extra objects that are not part of the basic model
- fuel = petrol
- gallon = four litres
- glue = to stick
- horsepower = a unit for measuring how powerful an engine is
- introduce = show to the people
- lead to = cause
- manual transmission =the parts of the car that take the power of the engine to the wheels ; this is done by changing gears
- petrol = a liquid that you get from oil ; it is used to make cars run
- pollution = when air, water and the world around us get dirtier
- raise = go up
- speed =how fast you travel
- tax = money that the government gets when you buy something
- windshield wiper = a long piece of metal with rubber on it that moves across the windshield when it rains