What the world needs now is no more cars

Just when rays of sunlight were starting to pierce the dense clouds of smog above, India’s Tata Motors has unveiled the world’s cheapest car, which it hopes will entice more of the country’s 1.1 billion inhabitants into automobiles. The pared-down 100,000-rupee ($2,500) Nano five-seater doesn’t get you much—33 horsepower, no radio, no air conditioning, no power anything—but it does get around 50 mpg and is being touted as the “People’s Car” for its relative affordability. Great, now that oil prices are at an all-time high, and there’s a supposedly global effort underway to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, why not put a few hundred thousand more cars on the road? Maybe China wants a few million, too. Yeah, capitalism!