201–210 of 264 posts
One of the reasons why the Renault Kwid is $4000 is because, well, it uses cheap materials, and with that comes a very bad safety rating. This is enabled by India's nearly non-existent car safety regulations. Everything has a "price".
Given that this car is targeting people who own 2-wheelers and want to upgrade, I'd still say it is a safer option
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's an obliviousness to the fact that they're driving thousands of pounds of steel and nobody else on the road is protected in the same way. I think they are, they just don't care in that part of the world. I remember in Cambodia seeing the Lexus SUVs constantly almost running pedestrians and riders over, if you can afford a Lexus in Cambodia, you can afford to get out of trouble for running someone over (altho…
All second hand. I dunno how Lexus got to be the only luxury car in Cambodia (I assume some deal involving Japanese loans for bridges/roads e.t.c) but all those cars are second hand. Still very expensive given the average income in Cambodia but anyone who's got the moeny ends up with a second hand lexus suv.
Anyone else feeling slightly uneasy with the exciting and "disruptive" plan of ushering a population of 1.3 billion into the glorious era of the fossil-fuelled car ? Seems exactly what the world needs right now.
The value created by access to a car they can afford will advance both India and the world to the next level of health, abundance, and technology. Just as the car and the ICE advanced so many other places of the world from the horse cart. With that I believe will come the education and technology needed to push us past ICEs and further into the future.
(1) when the car and the ICE advanced so many other places of the world, we didn't have alternative technologies. Now we do,
(2) climate change is already underway, with mid-term scenarios ranging from very worrying to catastrophic,
(3) the population densities and city sizes in those places of the world where ICE cars saw a boom in the last century were nowhere near that of India. A car-centric model in cities over 10M population is a disaster,
(4) for this reason the most comparable example would be China, who is experiencing massive pollution problems in cities, and has already reacted with traffic-restricting laws and the rapid construction of metropolitan mass-transit networks and a high-speed rail network.
I get the argument that it's unfair for the West to deny to others what we already experimented in the past, but I really don't think it's in the interest of India (even ignoring global factors like climate change) to become a massively polluting car-centric society. We know better now, the way forward is not to reenact the West's 80s, it's to take advantage of not having made the West's errors to skip that and embrace newer tech and trends directly (just as landlines were skipped in so many countries).
One of the reasons why the Renault Kwid is $4000 is because, well, it uses cheap materials, and with that comes a very bad safety rating. This is enabled by India's nearly non-existent car safety regulations. Everything has a "price".
A car, howsoever unsafe, is still an upgrade from a 2-wheeler. Given that this car is targeting people who own 2-wheelers and want to upgrade, I'd still say it is a safer option
One of the reasons why the Renault Kwid is $4000 is because, well, it uses cheap materials, and with that comes a very bad safety rating. This is enabled by India's nearly non-existent car safety regulations. Everything has a "price".
That delivery ceremony is amazing. Are the salaries so low in India that the car dealers can afford to have such a ceremony for every new car delivery?
Keep in mind that this is an article written by an American seemingly enamored by something in India, and like most write-ups of such kind, it romanticizes whatever happens in India while being over-critical of whatever happens back at home. As an Indian who currently lives in the US and has a much more 'level' view of both places, this fetishization is quite frustrating. That being said, the ceremony looks a little…
I know that in the UK, I bought a new BMW and we came in, my wife got flowers, the car was covered and she got to pull it off to 'reveal' it, and the vendor took a good 1/2 hour explaining all the gadgets etc. So no flowers on the car and priest onboard, but definitely 'ceremonious' enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To get a decent idea of what's going on, you need to know VMT per capita, fatalities per vmt, how many crashes are fatal, and ideally quite a few other things (urban/rural mix, etc.). One of the best ways to make roads safer would be to just let people drive less. The US has fairly safe roads per VMT (by world standards), but people end up driving a lot more than in most other places, which negates this somewhat.
I'd argue that even by VMT the US isn't that safe - it's still double the fatalities compared to the UK.
Of course, one problem is that despite being a very small percentage of the distance traveled, people walking account for 22% of deaths. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Anyone else feeling slightly uneasy with the exciting and "disruptive" plan of ushering a population of 1.3 billion into the glorious era of the fossil-fuelled car ? Seems exactly what the world needs right now.