Tata TechnologiesThe Indian firm is positioning the Emo as a proof of concept, but there are no plans to produce it.
The Tata Technologies electric mobility concept, or Emo, is a pure concept vehicle, with no clear path to production. So why was it built?
In a word, validation.
Nigel Giddons, the chief engineer who led much of the development of the electric vehicle from Tata Technologies’ American headquarters in Novi, Mich., said the car, which is to be parked at the Michelin Design Challenge display during the Detroit auto show next week, was made to “validate our own capabilities across the board.” Tata Technologies, a free-standing research, engineering and development company that is part of the India-based Tata Group, wanted to prove that the company could one day produce an affordable electric car for the American market that offered the same capabilities as the current crop of pricier E.V.’s.
The Emo was designed as a spartan wedge, with a glass top, seating for four and front doors measuring about twice as long as the rear ones. The few performance specifications released by the company would hardly send electric front-runners like Tesla and Nissan back to the drawing board — a 100-mile estimated range on a single charge and a top speed of 65 miles per hour — but the Emo is intended to impress on two fronts in particular.
First, it was designed to pass all federal safety requirements in the United States. “To do anything less would have made it a little too easy for us,” Mr. Giddons said. Second, it would sell for as little as $20,000, before subsidies, presuming Tata, best known for its $2,500 Tata Nano microcar, were to make it. Should current federal subsidies of up to $7,500 remain available, an Emo for $12,500 would drastically remap the entry point for E.V. shoppers.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Giddons called the project “very fulfilling.”
“We’ve done a lot of concept work like this, but it was always driven by customers,” he added.
Mr. Giddons said the Emo had no mechanical relation to the Nano, unveiled to much fanfare in 2008. “We certainly applied the word ‘minimalist’ in the way the Nano did,” he said. No creature comforts, in other words, like leather seats or dual-zone climate controls.
Tata TechnologiesThe concept has a fixed hatch. The rear seat doubles as cargo space.
Because reducing weight was essential to hit the team’s performance targets, the Emo does not have a rear hatch or a beefy B-pillar, the brace that creates rigidity between the front and rear doors. Instead, the rear doors swing out from the back of the car. The set-up, commonly known as suicide doors, creates a large space for entering and exiting. And though the car has four seats, it is only in “rare instances” that all four seats would be occupied, Mr. Giddons said. The team anticipated the seats to double as the main cargo component.
“We found that when you design an electric vehicle, the architecture gives tremendous flexibility,” Mr. Giddons said. “By fixing the rear gate, that improves the rigidity and torsion, and that minimizes the weight needed to achieve the targets.”
The body structure is conventional steel, but the panels are made from a molded polymer and do not require a trip through a paint shop, a step that creates airborne particulates.
Mr. Giddons’s team, which included engineers in Novi as well as in Tata Technologies’ offices in Britain and India, went from conceptualizing the project to the final build in just eight months. The team contracted suppliers for components like the windshield wipers and power steering, but the intent was to generate internal lessons about how to make electric cars, Mr. Giddons said, so most fabrication was kept internal.
The endgame for the car is hardly clear. “We are very keen to reinforce that there is no intention to produce this car,” Mr. Giddons said. But if the Emo is a rolling showcase of Tata’s know-how, the question facing the company in Detroit may be, “Why not?”
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