Just back from the mad rush and insane crush that was the 10th Auto Expo. Fantastic cars, great promise, huge enthusiasm and, of course, despicable conditions. Cro-Magnon man would have done a better job. And I don’t know what’s scarier, being a sentry in Kargil or a scantily clad model facing the hordes at Pragati Maidan. But dumped garbage and Kafka-esque disorientation aside, you’d have had to be bombed out of your brains not to have noticed that the Indian car industry is running at full boost. Car makers are literally falling over each other in the race to get into the Indian small-car market. And with an installed capacity of three million cars soon, we could become the world’s small-car factory.

But can Indian car makers progress from being more than just the local dadas? Can Tata and Mahindra step up to the plate and compete head to head, like Hyundai, Kia and Daewoo (now Chevrolet) do today? India’s only small car maker Tata has been burning the midnight lamp for the past decade, trying to play catch with the global car industry. Its engineering skills have taken a big leap forward and some of its processes are now world-class, but it’s still a long way from attaining the engineering finesse and sophistication needed to take on the best. Sure, the gutsy and brilliant Nano may redefine how car companies around the world make cars, and the little car may have gifted Tata star status and access to foreign customers, but the Pune-based company still has a lot of catching-up to do where traditional small cars are concerned. Still, Tata now has the good council and vast technical skills of Fiat and its rate of progress is bound to accelerate.

Hindsight is always 20:20, but Tata should have started off by borrowing or sharing a platform with any of the world’s successful car makers. It could have bought the rights to a generation-old platform or shared costs for a new one; the latter is exactly what Fiat did when the Italian small-car maker was being surrounded by sharks. It built its Grande Punto on an Opel Corsa platform and then sold the Fiat 500-platform to Ford for their new Ka. It’s how the Koreans got up to speed. And how GM, Toyota and Volkswagen have raked in the billions over the years – by sharing few platforms between multiple models. And this could be an ideal way for Mahindra and Bajaj to walk straight into the small-car market on their own steam.

Another massive opportunity not to be missed out on is the global electric-car market. Government of India-sloth aside, electric cars will be the diesels of tomorrow, with a majority of small cars going electric or using the internal combustion engines as range extenders. And Indian companies could play a pivotal role in making these cars more affordable for the rest of the world.

Companies like the Reva Electric Car Company and Tata are ideally poised to take advantage of this, but need the support of the government. Else, yet again, we could find ourselves 15 years behind the Chinese. The real Indian-designed and -engineered globally competitive small car, if there is one in our future, could be a small or micro car powered by a hybrid or electric motor. Now that doesn’t sound impossible, does it?