To everyone who says "personal cars will definitely reduce poverty," can I get an explanation? New York City seems to do just fine. And there are significant portions of other cities, in and outside the US, where cars are more trouble than their worth. If you could get around on a train or a bus, where you have productive time reading or napping, wouldn't you choose that? Rather than having to pay for gas and maintenance and insurance and taxes and an eventual replacement? Keep in mind, the Nanos are made to fall apart, with ball bearings that can't handle significant speeds.

And if we're looking to the US for comparison, shall we not forget that GM did considerably lobbying (and quite charitable funding the work to tear out streetcar lines, for instance) in order to get us addicted to our cars.

Is it really in the best interest of the poor to have WORSE air and WORSE traffic and WORSE safety (they already can barely cross streets) and MORE expenses besides? And that's not to mention the waste disposal problem that'll come with broken cars people can't afford to fix, left wherever they stopped running. Or the walls of scrap tires (for which we can look to Mexico <link> that breed mosquitoes and snakes?

Governments were invented to protect the public good. That the Nano isn't being challenged by the government or those who pretend to care for the poor (in India or any of the multitude of poverty-stricken nations that are just going to get much worse with global warming) is a mistake. Walkable cities, well-planned, with public transportation is the answer -- for the US as well as anywhere else.

One of the ancient empires in Ethiopia had a tent city as its capital because it had to change locations every five months (and not come back to that site for 10 years) because they exhausted the local resources so completely. Unfortunately, finding a new earth, that's proving to be a challenge ...