What are the typical stages involved in designing a car?
Girish: The typical stages in designing a car are benchmarking of existing products and trend analysis, setting targets, finalization of styling and packaging, detailed design of engine, transmission, body, trims and fitments, and other aggregates, involving vendors for respective systems and components, followed by manufacture of prototypes, testing of prototypes, and finalisation of the design. CE: The nano team had lots of concepts in the beginning to keep the costs low viz. a door-less car with bars as safety measure, soft doors in vinyl & plastic windows, cloth roof, two doors instead of four et al. How did the team finalize the design? Girish: These surely were ideas. We finally selected those concepts, which met the regulatory, performance , quality and customer requirements, and are those which are closest to our cost targets. Detailed concept comparison and evaluation was done for all aggregates, systems and components. Vendors also participated in this iterative process whole
