Proton was not around when I drove in Malaysia 25 years ago, but 17 years of living and driving cars in the United States has certainly opened my eyes as far as quality of vehicles is concerned.

For car manufacturers selling their vehicles in the US market, building quality cars is a given, at least it is if they expect to be around for awhile. If not, they will simply not exist.

That is the reason why Fiat, Lancia, Maserati (recently and carefully re-introduced), Rover, Lancia, Lotus, Peugeot and Alfa Romeo went bust in the 1980s. Even Daihatsu, despite good quality (but building small cars), could not make it in the US.

The Koreans, and Hyundai principally, during the early 1980s introduced inexpensive cars in the US and fared poorly against the competition, which was largely Japanese and domestic marques. The main reason for their scrappy performance was poor quality.

Driven to near-bankruptcy, Hyundai and Kia re-engineered their cars and re-introduced their latest models with 10-year warranties to back their improved quality. This has resulted in their runaway success, which would have been unheard of (or predictable) just a few years ago.

The point and lesson in all of this is that if you build world-class quality cars, people will buy them. A malaysiakini reader once said "...Malaysians need to overcome their bias about locally assembled cars."

The fact that Proton makes poor quality cars, or at least cars of inconsistent quality, simply serves to confirm the bias.

My personal inference, being involved in the quality arena for over 14 years, is that Proton has absolutely no idea what real competition is. This is so much like the Indian, Soviet Union (pre-disintegration), eastern European and some other national car industries that made cars of dubious quality and adopted a customer abuse policy with their take-it-or-leave it attitude.

Then again, this is a Malaysian government-executed programme and as such, it bears all the hallmarks of such an enterprise: ill-conceived, poorly-executed, with virtually no accountability, usually resulting in failure.

The way in which a venture of this kind, building a national car, was undertaken at all was never really debated. This was a gigantic programme that many sensible governments would debate to death before even opening a hearing on it.

A simple analysis of success factors alone for a viable car manufacturing operation in Malaysia would have nipped the idea in the bud at that time and saved taxpayers millions of ringgit. However, as is typical with many other mega-ventures of this nature in Malaysia, the half-baked idea is translated into reality within a short while with very predictable results.

By the way, what was the strategy behind acquiring Lotus? It is not that Lotus is a bad company. It is a very much a leading-edge engineering group and one that I admired as a student during their Colin Chapman days. However, acquiring a specialist group like Lotus implies a well thought out strategy on the part of Proton.

In my line of work we do months of careful analysis of potential acquisitions, study contributions, outline deliverables (by time periods) and plans for sustaining the acquisition including details of merging/integrating the acquisitions. Was this ever debated and expectations (in terms of deliverables) ever outlined?

If Lotus was acquired to feed engineering expertise in engines, handling, suspension, frame design, turbo charging etc, then where do we see this expertise realised in the Proton models? I am not talking about cosmetic tuning - you can do that without Lotus.

If that was the end goal anyway, why acquire it when you can contract on a per model basis cheaply, as others have done? My personal view is that it was an 'awe-inspired' acquisition to trick Malaysians into thinking that a Proton-Lotus link implied Lotus-engineered cars.

If you look at the automotive scene today, there are just a handful of major players, with mass-mergers (to remain competitive) being the order of the day. What has happened is that competition has become so intense - new model cycles are less than two and a half years now instead of five - that quality is at an all-time high, exemplary customer service a pre-requisite, warranties extended, safety is paramount (crash test statistics kill new models over here) and attention to detail is fanatical.

To remain competitive, a viable mass-market car company (like Proton) needs to invest very heavily in R&D. We are not talking millions, but billions of ringgit. Proton does not have that kind of money to invest in R&D, and to keep a manufacturing and distribution operation going.

Other than Toyota and Honda, the other Japanese manufacturers are struggling to stay in the R&D game. Unless you have a niche market (like Lamborghini or TVR, for example), you cannot go it alone, more so if you are an unknown entity like Proton. If anything, being unknown, Proton should have striven to deliver quality cars from day one!

Apparently, all this has escaped the notice of Proton. I was astonished to find out that they had enjoyed price-protection privileges for quite a while and had never bothered to improve upon their product or service.

Equally mind-boggling is that the Malaysian rakyat has been moulded, over the years, into accepting quality defects in a new vehicle (and its attendant customer service...er...I mean, customer abuse) as a matter of course.

If any car-maker built cars of this quality in the United States, you could expect to see them filing Chapter 11 (bankruptcy) within the year. Alfa Romeo has postponed their entry back into the US several times. Peugeot, Renault, Rover (except Land/Range Rover), Daihatsu and several others are very wary of US market demands. Even the quality-imbued Japanese have conceded the lower-end of the automotive market to the Koreans and no longer compete in that do-or-die arena.

Quite frankly, after witnessing this automotive 'take-no-prisoners' landscape transforming for almost two decades here, I do not see Proton taking on the Koreans...at least not in its current form. I think Proton truly believed (and continues to believe) that it would enjoy price-protection infinitely.

The tragedy of this kind of gross mismanagement is the rakyat who actually fund the entire venture! I read with dismay that the government is planning to re-introduce some other form of taxation after tariffs are lifted. This kind of action only serves to promote more of the tidak apa attitude that must form the core philosophy of Proton.

It is interesting to note that even in a failed enterprise, the Malaysian hallmarks still apply. Rather than admitting failure, launching a full-scale inquiry into the management of the venture, studying strategies, outlining disaster recovery strategies, defining deliverables, tying senior management compensation to measurable results, doing customer audits on quality perception, and other usual benchmarks we engage in with any business venture, what do we do?

The hallmarks are invoked once again: denial of a failed venture, more capital infusion (throwing good money after bad), a 'rescue' tariff protection in this case, or yet another potential Petronas-led bailout, and a minor management shuffle, of course, capping it all: the absolute lack of accountability for any of the foregoing.

Short of a joint venture with one of the majors, I do not foresee any future for Proton in a competitive world. It is unable to define itself clearly and its role in the automotive arena and has basked in the sunshine of tariff protection for too long to know what competition really means.