TATA'S TALE; A dossier on the Indian company that soon may own Jaguar and Land Rover.(News)

Byline: JULIAN RENDELL

If all goes as expected, any day now, Ford will conclude seven months of talks and announce the sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors of India.

This is automotive history in the making-the first time a carmaker from an emerging market has taken control of a front-line Western carmaker with established brands, heritage and a global footprint.

For Tata Motors, the car, truck and van subsidiary of the gigantic Tata Group, the purchase will mark the moment it moves away from being an automotive minnow with interests confined to Asia to being a global player. Not bad for a company that only started making cars in 1998 and has never sold a car in the United States.

But Tata Motors has been around much longer than that-its parent, Tata Group, dates to the 1800s. Tata Motors' genesis came in post-British Empire India, when a source was needed for heavy trucks and vans to keep newly independent India running smoothly. Tata's first heavy truck, a version of a Mercedes-Benz, came out in 1954.

Today, Tata claims to be among the world's top 10 heavy-truck makers, helped by buying the bankrupt Daewoo truck business at the same time General Motors acquired the Korean company's defunct carmaking arm. Trucks and vans account for about two-thirds of the company's annual production of 553,000 vehicles, according to analysts Global Insight. Cars account for 190,000 units per year, comparable to the sales of Saab and Jaguar combined.

For evidence that Tata has big plans to grow its car business, look no further than its recently announced Nano, the stripped-down $2,500 "Model T for India'' that the company hopes will pull Indians off their scooters and put them on four wheels. The company plans to invest $3 billion in new models and factories in India by 2012, with the intention of building 1.2 million vehicles a year by then. That's a lot of Nanos.