Flying Cloud

rba posted about the Tata Motors cheapo car that runs on compressed air not too long ago here Moteur Aircar. Interestingly, from a US economy meltdown standpoint, the Indian Company Tata Motors was the subject of a Financial Page profile in this week's The New Yorker by The Tata Invasion by James Surowiecki.

Tata has been able to do this [become rich by going a different route than others who sought to break into the US market] because of the way the global economy has changed. Even three decades ago, selling to the U.S. and Europe made sense, because that’s where all the money was. Most developing countries had only a minuscule upper class and a tiny middle class, and business conditions in these countries were difficult at best. Today, the economies of developing countries are still only a fraction of the size of Western economies, but many nonetheless have growing middle and upper classes with disposable income. And, as the business professor C. K. Prahalad argues in his book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” even the poor in these countries constitute a market worth trillions of dollars. Twenty years ago, few people in India could have afforded even a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. Today, tens of millions can.