Five students make car for Rs 11,000

They spent two years sifting through scrapyards to find appropriate material for the car.

The creator of the common man's car Ratan Tata might be interested in reading this. Inspired by the cult reality show American Choppers where a father and son team create custom-made motorbike masterpieces out of parts of scrap, a group of five teenagers in Ahmedabad have used otherwise unusable scrap material to create a ready-to-drive four-wheeler for Rs 11,000.

The students, Aditya Sen (16), Debanshu Samanta (17), Purna Singh (14), Sukanya Rajgopal (12) and Jaidev Singh (13), who study at Delhi Public School (DPS) and Anand Niketan School, spent two years sifting through scrap yards in the city to find appropriate materials for the car.

As opposed to the accepted norm of creating a car design first and building it subsequently, the students had no rough sketch of the vehicle when they started out and built it up according to the materials they could gather. The rear window of the car has been sourced from a Fiat 1965 model. A Kinetic scooter and TVS Scooty's tyres make up the wheels of the car. The petrol tank is an unusable old geyser from a neighbour's home which has been connected to a gutter pipe and stuck with strong adhesive.

The tank has a 3-4 litre capacity. A 125cc Honda engine ripped off from a Kinetic scooter is the vehicle's engine. In fact, other than a hydraulic brake, every other component of the car is scrap material.

Although the commercial viability of the vehicle is not on the cards at the moment, Aditya Sen said the group had written to Ratan Tata explaining how the car was put together.

While RTO regulations prohibit the use of an unapproved vehicle on the road for safety reasons, the car has interested officials of Anand Niketan School who have agreed to fund the groups second venture which is creation of an eco-friendly four-wheeler.

"The students are keen to develop a solar-powered car for which I have already ordered solar panels from China which should be delivered within a month," said Kamal Mangal, head trustee, Anand Niketan School.