Tata Motors' UK research connection

A couple of hours’ drive from the roiling, horn-blaring chaos of Mumbai, Tata Motors’ manufacturing site at Pune sprawls over such a large area that the only way to tour its many workshops, production lines and testing facilities is in a kind of open-topped taxi. And if the journey between the two cities demonstrates the ubiquity of Tata in India — its logo emblazoned across the majority of trucks and buses, many taxis and cars, and peeking from the corners of billboards advertising everything from financial services and hotels to watches and jewellery — then the scale the Pune plant and the sheer number and variety of passenger and commercial vehicles inching their way around the production lines shows that this isn’t a company that’s satisfied to stand still.

But although Tata is synonymous with Indian industry, its international credentials are also strong. Its presence in the UK dates well back into the 19th century and it is now, by some measures, the biggest overseas investor in the country, owning Corus — the former British Steel, Jaguar Landrover and Tetley tea (the second-largest tea brand in the country, surely enough to embed it deeply into the national psyche), as well as businesses such as Tata Chemicals in the northeast. And although Tata Motors’ bosses are adamant that the commercial vehicles and company-badged passenger models such as the Indica, the Indica and the Nano — the world’s cheapest production car — are strictly for its home market and for regions such as Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, they still choose to locate the R&D for Tata Motors in the UK, the home of its premium automotive brands.