KINIBIZ This concept of a national car is an insidiously sick one, relying on patriotism to protect an inefficient industry behind high tariff walls and artificially inflating car prices to provide profits to what have become privately owned industries at the expense of the Malaysian public.

And now the architect of this sick policy, former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, has come up with yet another “reason” for sustaining the national auto industry - translate that to sustaining the sick old man of the industry, Proton, now owned by his crony Syed Mokhtar Albukhary via DRB-Hicom.

Mahathir argues that if the national auto industry goes, then the country will lose some RM12 billion in foreign exchange a year.

“Assuming an average price of RM40,000 per unit, the total sales value would be about RM12 billion (for 300,000 national cars). This additional amount will be an outflow if all cars are imported.

“Taking everything into consideration, Proton has contributed much towards the nation’s economy and its development,” he said.

On the face of it looks very compelling, but let’s examine it further.

Go to KiniBiz for the complete article .

This article was written by P Gunasegaram.