Segway to tailfins?

The best laid plans for personal transportation oft go flat. As goes India...

"This was the flagship product for the passenger-car market. The disappointing sales are a pretty big negative for the group," said Anil Sharma, an analyst at IHS Automotive, an industry consulting company.

Tata made a big bet on the Nano. It spent close to $400 million developing the vehicle and hundreds of millions more building a factory capable of manufacturing 15,000 to 20,000 of the tiny cars a month.

With sales now hovering around 2,500 a month, down from a peak of about 10,000 in April 2012, that means a lot of idle capacity at the plant in the western state of Gujarat, and a lot of frustrated Tata dealers around the country.

The cheapest car in the world doesn't move out the door. Yet, cars that people like still sell;

One of the few bright spots is Tata's U.K.-based Jaguar Land Rover luxury-vehicle unit acquired from Ford Motor Co. ...in 2008. For the three months ended June 30, profit at that unit rose 33% to £675 million ($1.07 billion), while sales rose 11% from a year earlier to £4 billion.

In August, Tata sold about the same number of Jaguar XF sedans than Nanos. Roughly 19 Nanos could be purchased for the about $47,000 starting price of an XF base model in the U.S. market.

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