The Racemo is India's first connected sports car

Trying to establish a new brand in the midst of the auto connectivity revolution is tricky, as evidenced by Tata's new sub-brand and its sports car, the Racemo.

Tata, the parent company of Jaguar ^[1] Land Rover ^[2], recently established Tamo. It's a new sub-brand that will focus on low-volume models that serve as test-beds for new technologies. Its first car is the Racemo, meant for the Indian market.

I may not have much faith in the tech inside, but I can dig on the Racemo's good looks.

Tata Motors

The Racemo will be limited to just 250 examples when it goes on sale in 2018. It's a midengine sports car, with a 1.2-liter I3 good for 187 horsepower and 155 pound-feet of torque. Its automated manual transmission will help it achieve a 0-60 sprint in about 6 seconds, which is solidly sporty.

Marketed as India's first connected car, the Racemo according to Tata will involve a number of technologies, including cloud computing, analytics and mapping, but the company offered little, if any detail, about how that might play out. A quick gander at a Racemo video on YouTube (embedded below) only serves to add to the confusion. It's like a marketing team was given a bunch of video editing software, a handful of mushrooms and no rules whatsoever.

However, one thing will be for certain -- the Racemo+, a hopped-up, race-only variant of the Racemo, will make an appearance in Forza Horizon 3 ^[3] for the Xbox One ^[4]. It'll be the first Indian brand to appear in the game. It sounds like there will be actual track activities where folks can drive the Racemo+ in real life, as well.

The car itself looks promising, and it's good to s ee Tata using India as its proving grounds for new technology that could expand to other markets in the future. I just wish there was a bit more specificity in how it plans to use the new technology it touts.

If you're only going to build 250 of them, why nothave scissor doors?

Tata Motors