Tata Magic

This is the catalogue record of the Tata Magic, one of 35 models Tata Motors Ltd has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 2007. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Tata Magic properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Hyundai Hyundai i30, the Nissan Nissan GT-R, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Tiguan — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Tata Magic reads like this: the record lists its engine as Diesel engine / Diesel: / 702 cc Straight-twin engine / I2 / 798 cc I2 Turbocharger / turbo / Natural gas vehicle / CNG: / 702 cc I2 / Petrol engine / Petrol: / 694&; quoted output is 26-31 kW; kerb weight is recorded at 1000-1100 kg; drive goes through 4-speed Manual Transmission / manual GBS 65-4 / 5-speed manual GBS 65-5; the layout is Front-mid engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 26 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Tata Motors Ltd story

Within Tata Motors Ltd's own catalogue the Tata Magic sits alongside the TaMo Racemo, the Tata 407, the Tata Ace Zip, the Tata Altroz. Assembly is recorded at Pune, India / Pantnagar, Uttarakhand, India.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Tata Magic was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.