With sales going through the roof during the festive season, the timing of our cover story this month couldn’t be better. It looks like the appetite for cars is coming back at last and we’ve lined up a feast of what’s coming in the next 12 months. There’s nothing like a constant flow of new models to excite buyers and if the current mood prevails we could be back on the road to reach the highs of 2007.
 
2010 will see some significant launches from Nissan, Ford and of course Maruti, but nothing will create the impact the Nano did this year. That’s the problem for every new Tata car which will find it hard to break out from the shadow of its superstar sibling. A case in point is the newly launched Indigo Manza which hasn’t generated a fraction of the Nano’s buzz. However, for Tata Motors, the Manza is a very significant model and the culmination of all that the company has learnt in the past decade. It’s easily the best car Tata has produced yet and a credible rival to other well established entry-level saloons.
 
The previous Indigo came three years after the Indica but the Manza arrives just a year after the Vista was launched, a sign of how quickly Tata Motors has progressed. But the world has moved on as well. A decade ago, slapping a boot onto a hatchback to create a saloon was the obvious thing to do but not anymore. The trend these days is to completely re-skin different body styles that are spun off the same platform to strongly differentiate them. The Fiat Linea and Grande Punto or the Honda City and Jazz each look distinctive and different in their own right and are good examples of what can be achieved from a
common platform.

However, Tata has stuck to the cheaper route of simply adding a ‘third-box’ onto the Vista. The styling has clearly been compromised and the Manza isn’t anywhere as well proportioned as the Linea. But will this undermine its chances of success? Not if the Swift Dzire is anything to go by. The integration of the boot on the Swift is a particularly sloppy job and looks like an afterthought. Yet, it is by far the best-selling saloon in the country. Beauty, as they say, is in the eyes of the beholder.