PROTON: Moving Forward??

I seem to have a problem with playing an MPEG4 video on this blog. Anyways this is the new Proton Satria Neo. I already did a blog on this car but somehow blogger.com deleted it. So everything was gone and I had to write a new one.

Anyhew, maybe the reason why Proton came out with this car was to cover their lost of RM348 million due to their purchased of MV Augusta Spa. You can criticise Proton all you want but I have to respect them for taking such a drastic approach to expend their 'empire'. Don't you think they made a great decision by buying Lotus. Proton didn't have enough capabilities to do their own R&D for their vehicles so they bought Lotus which at that time was about to go bankcrupt. Now most of Proton cars are tuned by Lotus.

The same goes with Satria Neo. It uses a Campro engine that's been tuned by Lotus and it's not too bad either. The car can go up to 40 miles to the gallon. Unfortunately, you can't get a lot power from a 1600cc engine, only 110hp.

Actually, when I first had a good look at this car, I thought "Are the design engineers at Proton so damn lazy that they just took the front end of Waja and put it on this car?" And then I thought of Porsche, a car company that has been using the same front end for about 50 years, for its cars and now its SUV. I figured that that car manufacturers do that because they want to create their own image and identity. It's like when you look at a car, you know it's a Porsche just by looking at its front end. Cars like BMW, Saab and Audi have been doing so for years.

And I agree with what Proton is trying to do. After more than 20 years in the automotive industry, they are maturing into a more establish car manufacturer. Hopefully, Proton will not stop at this point to make themselves more known in the automobile world and perhaps, the U.S??