$2,000, 56 mpg Tata Nano, now available

It's time to choose sides in the Tata Nano debate. The car has officially hit streets in India, and will likely be coming to the U.S. in 2011 or 2012. The price for the Indian market is under $2,000, making it the cheapest new car in history.

It's likely that you should have an opinion about it. Here are the camps where people have started setting up their tents, just in case you're curious.

1. America, Europe and Japan have been working their butts off trying to get a high mileage car on the roads, and the only way they've done it is with magnificent technology that costs far more than traditional cars. India did it for $2,000. We should be ashamed
2. The Tata Nano is going to destroy the world. Suddenly two billion more people can afford cars! What we have is not people replacing their cars with a more efficient car, we have people buying cars who have never owned cars before. This will more than double the greenhouse gas inputs from the developing world. In the words of the chief scientist of the IPCC "I'm having nightmares” about this car.
3. The U.S. and Europe can't hold back the developing world in ways they were never held back. Inexpensive microcars will usher in a new age of economic development in India and China.
4. The lack of good mass transit anywhere in the world is a disgrace and single-passenger vehicles are simply never going to be a solution for urban areas. We need to move forward with convenient, safe and comfortable mass transit. That's where real economic development comes from.

I'm pretty much in the fourth camp here. There are good and obvious reasons why America has never produced this kind of cheap microcar. The obvious ones being that no one bought Geos when GM made them and that American / European emissions and safety regulations make cars much heavier and more expensive than the Nano.

The Nano won't destroy the world, and we can't deny the developing world what we've already granted ourselves (and oh so much more). But I don't think that the Nano will be much more than another small step towards India's future economic strength. 

We've known forever that the growing world-wide middle class will be a strain on the environment. What we need are mass transit solutions and clean vehicle technologies for this coming boom, and we need them soon.