Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors has received 203,000 orders for the Nano, the cheapest car in the world. The bookings amount to almost 2,500 crore rupees ($501 million).
“The Tata Nano has drawn over 2.03 lakh fully-paid bookings, amounting to nearly Rs 2,500 crore, in an encouraging response to the car launched on March 23,” Tata Motors said in a statement. Total of 610,000 application forms were purchased from the around 30,000 booking centres spread over 1000 locations, the company said.
Tata Motors had fixed a booking amount of Rs 95,000 for the Nano Standard, Rs 1.2 lakh for the Nano CX and Rs 1.4 lakh for the Nano Standard. “Among the three variants of the car, 20% bookings are for the Nano Standard, 30% for the Nano CX and the remaining 50% for the top-end Nano LX,” Tata Motors said.
Deliveries will start in July and are expected to be completed in the last quarter of 2010, the company said. Company will choose the first 100,000 customers for the One lakh rupee car or Tata Nano by a lottery.
Tata Motors said it will pay an 8.5% interest rate to customers who aren’t successful in the initial lottery but retain their bookings for the first year and will pay 8.75% for the second year.
The bookings for Nano started on April 9 and closed on April 29. Online bookings were also made through a specially created Web site.