I have been a car nut since I was a toddler, and goes without saying the things I would draw would only be something auto related. I used to fill my drawing books with car sketches of all shapes and sizes, and while they were appreciated, the hobby kind of took a back seat as time passed. An email from Tata motors immediately brought back those memories. It was an invite to their Global Design Studio at the Pune plant to have a Design Master Class with non other than Pratap Bose, the Vice President, Global Design for Tata Motors. Now that was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Gave in my confirmation and the wait began.

D-Day started off pretty early with the cab pick up at 4.30 am. We were supposed to be in Pune by 8.30. A late flight back from Chennai the previous night meant I had hardly slept a wink, but the excitement of the day had me as fresh as a daisy. On reaching the Tata Motors plant at the designated time, security checks were done at the reception and stickers were put on our phone cameras to prevent us from clicking test mules inside the plant. We journalists are notorious for clicking spy shots you see. We were then escorted to the reception of the Global Design Studio for some refreshments and tea. Post the meet and greet, we finally entered the studio space, being reminded that we are a privileged few and that even most Tata Motors employees don’t get to see what goes behind those closed walls.

The Pune Studio is one of the four design studios that Tata Motors has across the globe. The other three are located at Coventry (UK), Turin (Italy) and and Gunsan (South Korea). There is a design team of 165 professionals who work on passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles and electric vehicles. The studio is capable of delivering a project on an end-to-end basis i.e. beginning with concept sketches and concluding with the data release for production tooling.

We made our selves comfortable and soon enough, the man of the hour Pratap Bose walked in to start off the day’s proceedings. After a round of introductions, which by the way were very informal, Pratap started off by taking us through the journey of Tata Motors from a truck maker to a passenger car maker. It was quite nostalgic to see images of the first gen Indica and Safari on the presentation screen. He also told us how Tata was the first car maker to provide a plastic bumper in India. He also shared theory behind Tata’s Impact Design philosophy and the importance of mind sharing. Mind sharing is essentially how a customer thinks about a brand by way of its products. We also got an insight into Tata’s two modular platforms – Alfa and Omega. While the upcoming Altroz will be Tata’s first product on the Alfa platform, the Harrier was the first on the Omega which is based on the Land Rover D8 platform. The upcoming Harrier 7-seater will be the second product off the Omega platform. Pratap also told us that the lifecycle of an architecture spans around 15 to 20 years, so we can expect Alpha and Omega to be around till the year 2040. Post the presentation, Pratap took us for a walk around of 1:1 scale models of the Harrier SUV and the ACE Edge pickup. Pratap explained the vendor processes that go into making each and every part of the production car. Also seen were clay models of the Altroz hatchback and ACE pickup.

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