The big drop in sales for Toyota cars in Malaysia

In 2016 it has been tough for many car makers with many of them seeing significant reduction in sales volume compared to 2015. This can be blamed on rising cost of living and the drop in the local currency against the US dollar. The economic contraction is very evident and banks are also issuing fewer car loans since they need to protect themselves from losing money from repossession. It is a difficult situation to be in. However, not all car makers are seeing big reductions in car sales. Honda for one has been enjoying records sales and same for Mercedes Benz. The ones that has been suffering the most surprisingly has been Toyota.
Toyota being one of the market leaders for many years for the non-local car brand suffered significant reduction in sales volume in 2016. The sales volume dropped by more than 30% and this allowed Honda to take the lead which is unprecedented. Honda has always been a distant second to Toyota but not any more. The new models such as the HRV and the new Civic really took the fight to Toyota. Despite Toyota introducing the new Hilux and Fortuner models it was not enough to keep the lead. The popular models such as the Vios and Camry lost a lot of ground when compared to the City and the Accord. This hurt Toyota massively and they looked out of sorts not knowing what to do and how to recover the lost sales. Toyota had to quickly do a mid life cycle face lift within 18 months of the car's launch. This is unheard of.
Toyota can no longer rest on their laurels and believe that the brand name alone can keep them at the top. The models introduced by Toyota have been very out of date and looked aged. The younger buyers are looking for fresher and newer designs which Honda has cleverly benefited from. It is unsure if the models introduced by Toyota was selected by Thailand or Japan but it appears that the better and newer models are held in Japan. Toyota cannot keep having this type of attitude if it is to lead the market once again.
Hopefully Toyota will learn from Nokia's mistake and not think that it is too big to fail. With the power of the internet and mobility, the younger generation are the ones who will be buying the cars and if Toyota cannot offer models that will appeal to the younger generation then Toyota's future will be doomed.

Mazda did a turn around one generation ago with their Kodo designed models and it has paid dividends. Toyota really needs to think about this approach and not be so ultra conservative. Conservative business has been left in the dust, it is time to be up to date or even ahead of its time.

the number of gears in transmissions

In the past 4 gears was the norm for car transmissions and this stayed for a long time from the 1970s to the 1980s then a gradual change took place where car transmissions moved on to have 5 gears. This stayed the same for over a decade until a few car companies decided to offer 6 gears. This was limited to some top end luxury cars such as BMW, Mercedes and Porsche.

Since the mid 2000 where the oil price shot up every car maker was rushing to introduce cars that offer better fuel economy and seeing that it was difficult to squeeze more efficiency from an engine the next best route was to improve the transmission by offering more gears. It was proven that with more gears and lower gearing at cruising speed the engine would rev lower thus saving fuel. This concept did make sense but it was somehow got carried away with car maker nows push up to 10 gears in their transmission system. BMW started using their 8 speed automatic in the F10 5 series and F30 3 series, then came Mercedes with their 9 speed automatic in the S and E Class models. Ford and Honda and Hyundai took one step further by introducing 10 gears.

Honda was previously focused on using the CVT system but it was not well received and had problems. Honda filed for patent for their triple clutch 10 speed transmission making it the first in the world triple clutch 10 speed. Ford and Hyundai were using conventional automatic transmission but adding the gears to make up 10. With this number of gears the transmission would have to be automatic as it would not be practical to swap gears manually. Porsche pushed the maximum number of gears for manual transmission to 7 and this was getting troublesome. With so many gears the driver will be spending too much time holding onto the gear level changing gears all the time. It didn't make practical sense.

Transmission systems with high number of gears have been around for a long time but those are installed in trucks and buses where the truck or bus has to lug heavy weight and being diesel the rev band is very short. the bus or truck had to be in the power band to be able to lug the heavy payload.

On the flip side electric cars have no gears and is able to run without using a conventional transmission. It will be interesting to see how far transmission technology will change in the near future.

power and more power!

It is obvious that ever since the engine downsizing exercise started all the car companies have been going the force induction route. the slowest of the lot being the Japanese car makers like Toyota and Mazda who still stick to the natural aspirated engine route. The non Japanese however have gone crazy with the turbo charging concept and have been busy bumping horsepower up like there is no tomorrow.

Each class of car now has their own set of monsters. Monsters?! I mean power monsters that are cars with ridiculous amounts of power. The hot hatch cars like the VW Golf and the Ford Focus use to have a mild 200+ horsepower but now the R version of the Golf is pushing close to 300hp and the Ford Focus RS version has well over 300hp and of course we cannot forget the Mercedes AMG45 which pushes out 370hp. While this is all good for the people who want to buy a pocket rocket, the power that these cars push out now is more than a much larger mid size saloon used to push out 15 years ago. The Mercedes E55 AMG from 15 years ago didn't even manage 350hp!

For the mid size saloons, the Mercedes E65 AMG and the BMW M5 push well past 500hp and is in what once was considered super car territory. It wasn't very long ago that the Porsche 911 turbo only had 480hp which is consider very low these days. Even the Ferrari F430 only had 490hp while the BMW M5 of today is pushing 550hp!!

then comes the SUVs, these giants never once broke the 450hp mark and had to lug around well over 2,000kg of weight. Now, the current models can easily break the 500hp mark and AMG even offers a kit for their G class to go into the 600hp territory!!

Super cars with 600hp are no longer interesting, hyper cars are now the hot topic. The magical 1000hp developed by the Veyron is no longer a yard stick. Cars like the Koenigsegg One:1 easily beats that with their 1340hp engine. the hyper cars like the LaFerrari and Mclaren P1 is easily breathing down the necks of the Veyron. Then now come new players NextEV with 1340hp all electric power.

all this power is definitely changing the automotive industry but the question still remains, can the buyers of these cars handle it? When is it considered too much power? Bragging right aside the safety aspect is something to ponder about. the new cars no doubt have traction control and other driving aids but there is also the law of physics. It is often you see in the news that someone crashes their super car because they didn't know to drive it properly or didn't have the skill to drive it properly despite having traction control and driving aids. There is a limit on how much the computer can save the driver.

when less is more expensive !

Car makes try to load in a lot of functions and electronic gizmos to make their cars more attractive to the buyer. Things like Sat-nav, Apple play head units, Bluetooth connectivity, blind spot indicators, lane departure warning and etc. The list goes on and on. Same goes for safety such as additional airbags, thicker pillars and thicker door structures. All this is good and in the name of safety.
Then comes the sports and super car makers who will flip it their other way and take everything out to save weight. One would think that removing these items from the car would be cheaper since you have less gadgets in the car. The answer is no! car makers like Porsche and Lamborghini charge the customer more for the light weight version with no radio, no air conditioning, no power windows, no sound insulation and not electric mirrors! Instead some of the car parts have been exchanged with carbon fibre panels to further reduce weight. The car may be 100-150kg lighter but the cost of the car goes up by at least 10-15% over a standard model.

to the average guy this is ridiculous but to the hardcore enthusiasts this is a god send. it may seem very strange that one would have to pay more to get less. I think it is all down to clever marketing by the car makers and creating the elusiveness of the model to make it special. Having the courage to charge more for it gives it the perception of being special.

These light weight models are usually sold very quickly as they are made in limited quantities and are often traded at much higher prices once the car has left the showroom. It is impressive that such a concept can work but it has been making Porsche and Lamborghini a lot of money in the last decade.

Lamborghini's SuperLeggera models and the Porsche GT3 models and the R models are highly sought after and since the production was very limited some models can transact at double the original price when it is resold in the second hand market.

NextEV NIO EP9 hypercar!

The electric revolution is here to stay and to add to that statement the up-start EV company called NextEV based in the US has just made a massive jump forward. Their NIO EP9 hyper car is able to hang with the best of the hybrids and best of the fossil fuel powered hyper cars from Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche and Koenigsegg. This electric monster pumps out an impressive 1360hp which is almost on par with the Koenigsegg One:1. Power is one thing but the handling must be there to match the performance and on a track like the Green Hell any inadequacy will show. The EP9 really made its mark that electric hyper cars can be as good as hybrids and fossil fuelled hyper cars. The EP9 lapped the Nurburgring in 7m 05 seconds.

to crack the 8 minute mark around the Nurburgring is one thing but to get close to 7 minute mark is a real feat on it is own. The car looks very futuristic and yet it is functional. The lithium-ion battery pack is good for 260 miles on a single charge and is incredibly fast. Elon Musk was right with his Tesla and NextEV just cemented that concept.

this car will be the talk of the town when it is officially launched. The big boys like Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche and Mercedes will be looking closely at this specimen. It will be a tall order to beat this car. Hyper cars are a good statement to show what the company is capable of but it may not necessary make the company a lot of money. NextEv will need to plan for regular cars that the masses can buy. A sedan and a SUV will mostly likely emerge as these models will be mass sellers. Electric cars are still quite expensive in comparison with fossil fuel cars but with sufficient economies of scale for battery production the prices will start to drop making it more affordable for more people.

Want to go faster? get better tyres

The age old debate about how to go faster has been on going since people started racing their cars. Most guys would think that having more power would naturally mean the ability to go faster. there is some truth in that but there is a condition attached to that statement. If there is more power and you are able to put it all down to the road effectively then you will go faster, however if your car has much better tyres but not as much power you can still be able to keep up or be faster than a car that has much more power. Many people may beg to disagree with me on this but without the ability to effectively put the power down the extra power is wasted. the tyres are the only contact your car has with the road and if there is insufficient traction the car isn't going anywhere!

Better tyres mean faster cornering speeds which leads to higher corner exit speed and the ability to reach the top speed sooner. On a car that has inferior tyres but higher engine power the car would have lower cornering speed and corner exit speed meaning that it would have to work harder to accelerate to catch the car with the higher corner exit speed. Like in Formula One you can naturally see that the cars that just came out of a tyre change with fresh tyres, when the tyres are up to temperature the speed of the car is much greater than before it went into the pit to change tyres. The lap times were very obvious and in many cases it can be as much as 2 seconds a lap difference.

Most guys are too wrapped up about engine power and making more power. It would be highly frustrating to drive a car with a tonne of power but no grip. The  car would be sliding all over the place and struggling in each turn. Watching lower powered cars passing you would be no fun! Cars like the Mazda Mx-5 is able to keep up with many more powerful cars is because it is gentle on its tyres due to its light weight body plus it is cheap to buy very good tyres for the MX-5 compared to much more powerful cars which have much larger tyres.

the moral of the story is to save up money to buy good tyres if you want to be fast. Forget about spending a lot of money for engine power.

Proton Saga or Proton's Saga more like it

Proton introduced their very first model called the Saga back in the mid 1980s. the very model stayed in production for about 20 years before the next model came out, and now the 3rd generation finally came out. Spanning 30 years Proton only introduced 3 generations of the Saga. Now I know why they call it the Saga because it like a movie or story saga where it goes on and on taking a decade at least to see a new model. In this modern day all car companies are shortening their model life cycles to keep their model line up fresh and exciting. Even Porsche who previously took 9 years to introduce a new model has been shortening its model life cycle because it knows that the more new models they introduce will lead to more sales.

Proton's R&D department is taking the motto of "Don't fix whats not broken" to the extreme or they are just plain lazy! The newer iterations of the Saga seems like a minor step forward. Some may argue that it is a bare basic car and what can you really expect? That can easily be answered by the closest rival from Perodua which continuously take bigger and bigger steps ahead of Proton. Cheap doesn't mean it has to be bad! Cheap can also be decent if you do it right. Perodua is fortunate that they can draw from the massive parts bin from Daihatsu Japan and Proton is left developing engines of their own. However since Proton is better that assembling cars rather than doing its own R&D I would think that it would make better sense for them to solely focus on rebadging cars. The Proton Wira, Waja and Perdana were fine examples from Mitsubishi and they were reliable and decent value for money. If you don't have the right capacity to do R&D, stick to what you know best... rebadging cars.

the new Saga claims to be better but it is still yet to be seen. Proton claims good initial sales but this can be seen only in 6 months time when the sales figures are published rather than claimed by Proton. Making claims about the sales figures to boost confidence is one thing but the actual sales figure will speak for itself.

I wouldn't judge too quickly but there is always a market in malaysia for entry level cars. The economy is not good now and cheaper cars will be more popular since those who can't afford Japanese or Korean brands will revert to buying local cars.