When Ratan Tata first came to Geneva 11 years ago to unveil his Indica, he said his biggest hope was that Europe would take his company, and his cars, seriously. If the crowd pushing shoulder-to-shoulder on the rather low-key Tata stand today is any yardstick, he has achieved that ambition in spades.

Not because they were jostling to see the latest versions of the still successful Indica (or the new Safari or Xenon), and not necessarily because they were hoping (in vain) for confirmation that Tata has finally bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford.

No, they were beating a path to Tata’s door because Ratan Tata was proudly showing a car that is unlikely to make it to Europe in anything like the form we’ve seen here; a car that he has made it one of his life’s ambitions to build; a car that has already attracted amazing headlines in the European press, including “is this the most significant car since the Model T?”

And as Ratan’s vision for putting the ordinary people of India on the road, maybe the Tata Nano is exactly that. At 100,000 Rupees (around $2,500 U.S.), the standard version is easily the cheapest ”real” car in the world, and could genuinely take millions of Indian families off their motor scooters and horse-carts and into a form of transport they never dreamed they could afford.

Basic in the extreme, of course, but capable of carrying five people rather more comfortably and safely than a moped, its 623 cc two-cylinder engine gives it just about enough performance to get out of its own way, but that is all the market demands. They even claim that its tailpipe emissions are lower overall than most of the two-wheelers being built in India today.

And alluding to another car that rewrote the history books some time after the Model T, Tata talk about the Nano as their ”People’s Car.” To bring it to Europe at all would need so much engineering (and so much additional cost) that it would no longer be the Nano anyway, so that really isn’t the point.

But you did get the impression that in the real world this was probably the most significant car of the show. By far.