Tata Motors gets into racing mode with ‘Racemo’

Tata Motors on Tuesday unveiled its first sports car called 'Racemo' - a two-seater, fully connected coupe - at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show, in what is the car maker's newest product from its ambitious TAMO project.

Tata Motors, which has been passing through a bad patch for the past few years, looks set for a resurgence with the success of its new models like Tiago, and its entry into the sports car category is a major shift in its strategy.

The sports car market is currently dominated by German giants like Porsche, Mercedes and BMW and Tata Motors expects to make a push into the highly competitive market with its first product under its new sub-brand TAMO.

''As India is globally the most demanding auto market if you get India right you are ready for the world. This is our emotional and unexpected leap into the future,'' managing director Guenter Butschek said.

The Racemo has a 1.2-litre revotron turbocharged petrol engine, which develops a peak power of 190ps and can reach 0-100 km/hr in 6 sec. ''This is the first digitally native car co-developed with Microsoft,'' said Tim Leverton, head of engineering at Tata Motors.

Recemo features low seating and ultra stylish gullwing doors, over-arching fenders, tiny but powerful headlights and big tyres. The company has not indicated if it wants to commercially launch the two-seater sports coupe.

Powered by Microsoft, Racemo aims to bring alive connected technologies such as cloud computing, analytics, geo-spatial and mapping, and increased human-machine interface, creating a new benchmark in the industry for connected vehicles.

Butschek said, ''Racemo is built on a patented MOFlex Multi-Material Sandwich (MMS) structure – a structural technology, enabling greater freedom in surface design, efficient large-scale part integration leading to modularity and faster time to market. ''We launched our sub-brand TaMo as our answer to new technologies, business models and partnerships.

The Racemo is the first innovation from TAMO, and our emotional, unexpected leap to the future. Symbolising the change that is taking place at Tata Motors, 'Racemo' is the proving ground of the TAMO family of vehicles and will drive the future of India's connected generation. From styling and design to driver experience and technology, Racemo is an extension of customers' personality, a part of their digital ecosystem and will break the ice with a radical new presence and pique the interest in the parent brand,'' added Butschek.

TAMO as a new, separated vertical will operate in the first step on a low volume, low investment model to provide fast-tracked proves of technologies and concepts.

TAMO will act as an open platform to network with global startups and leading tech companies, to get access to trends, innovations and solutions, for the design of exciting future products and services. For the rapidly changing automotive environment, TAMO aims to transform the experience of interfacing and interacting with customers and the wider community. TAMO will provide a digital eco-system, which will be leveraged by Tata Motors to support the mainstream business in the future.