India’s TATA Unveils First Sportscar

India’s Tata Motors showcased a preproduction versions of the Italian-design Racemo two-seat sports car from its new upscale subbrand, TAMO.

The company said sales would begin in India later this year, but did not rule out eventually selling the model in Europe, according to Reuters.

“It might be a bold statement, but it actually represents our aspirations for going beyond the borders of India,” Tata Motors CEO Gunther Butschek said at the Geneva auto show on Tuesday.

Butschek called India the world’s most demanding automotive market. “If you get India right, you are ready for the world,” he said.

The Racemo reflects that global ambition. Its connectivity technology, including navigation, predictive maintenance and over-the-air updates, was developed jointly with Microsoft. Tata’s design studio in Turin, Italy, was responsible for styling.

Tata Motors also owns the Jaguar and Land Rover UK luxury brands.

“This is a specialist product, but our future products will be more mainstream,” he said of TAMO. “It’s a way of us also repositioning our brand, our brand image, right now to a more positive, innovation, technology profile.”

Tim Leverton, Tata Motors’ head of engineering described the Racemo as a test bed to prove trickle-down innovation for the rest of the Tata Motors range. “We are using TAMO to prove the concept of these technologies, to do it quickly, and then be able to deploy those technologies onto the mainstream products,” Leverton said.

Tata Motors is a subsidiary of Tata Industries, a $100 billion conglomerate with interests in numerous companies and sectors, which bought the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford Motor Co. in 2008 for $2.3 billion.

Jaguar and Land Rover sales have surged under Tata’s stewardship and investment, with more than half a million vehicles sold globally in 2016, including 221,758 in Europe, a 22% increase from 2015.