Years ago, when I was working in a Japanese company, the Japanese used to laugh at our high car prices. They told me that for a similar model, a Japanese car would be about half the price of that sold in Malaysia.

Only then did I realise that our car duties and taxes must be fantastically high. Subsequent inspection of the make-up of Malaysian car prices serves to confirm it.

Even our made-in-Malaysia Proton is not that cheap compared to a similar sized Japanese model sold in Japan. With the Afta and WTO, agreements, we thought we could now get to enjoy much lower car prices .

But to our dismay and disappointment, car prices remain not only as high as pre-Afta, but have increased. It looks like the government is bent on protecting Proton using the money of Malaysian car owners.

If all Malaysians had to fork out a few ringgit to support our national car producer, I believe nobody would complain. But the car owners alone have to fork out tens of thousands of ringgit to support Proton. Isn't this asking for the sky? And in this case, Proton, with the connivance of the BN government, seems to be getting away with it.

China, with its relatively new car market, has seen a drop of about 30 percent in its new car prices with the removal of duties. And China, too, has its own car industries.

Must I remind the Malaysian government that other countries importing our Proton cars can also do the same (tit-for-tat) when our cars are exported to their countries, i.e. by imposing excise duties on our cars?