BY many accounts, our national car the Proton Saga is a huge success story. Over 1.2 million Sagas have been sold during the car's lifespan, and it's become a household name not just here, but across the Causeway as well.
On the road, the Saga is ubiquitous to the point of being as much a Malaysian icon as the Twin Towers.
Credit to the Saga has to be given too, for laying the foundation for our national car industry. We might have imported Japanese technology to get the first Proton Sagas rolling, but we don't really need it for the current ones.
Speaking of which, the latest Saga is a strong offering.
It's more cleverly packaged, so it offers more interior space and a bigger boot despite its compact dimensions.
It's got pleasant styling, the interior feels properly screwed-together, and the ride and handling are genuinely good. Overall it's a better car than, say, the Chevy Aveo from Korea.
Moving away from the old, Mitsubishi Lancer-based Saga has proven that Proton is capable of standing on its own engineering feet, and the current car is a worthy showcase of local carmaking ability.
But while the latest Saga shows that Proton's engineering has come good, the company's product planners need a knock on the head. Why?
Let's step back in time to 1985 and look at the first Saga. It was essentially a clone of the Mitsubishi Lancer, which was then in its third generation. There's no shame in copying another carmaker's design if you're just starting out, by the way.
BMW got its start in the car business by licensing the design of the Austin 7, a popular runabout that was to Great Britain what the Ford Model T was to America: a car that put a nation on wheels and democratised driving.
At first, BMW assembled kits provided by Austin for its own version of the car, which it called the Dixi. Then it began to make its own parts for the car, building it under an agreement which required it to pay Austin a royalty fee for every Dixi assembled.
I've never driven an Austin 7, but it must have been good, because Nissan got its own start by cloning it, too.
Apparently there's some doubt as to whether an actual licensing agreement was hammered out, but that doesn't seem to have stopped Nissan.
Just like BMW, and Nissan, Proton's germination was sown with seeds borrowed from overseas. But look at what has happened since then. The Saga is now in its second generation, after a couple of decades. What about the Lancer on which it was based? That has gone on to its eighth generation, which rather suggests that the Saga should be in its sixth iteration by now, to have kept pace.
Okay, perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a fledgling carmaker to have come up with six generations of a single model in its first two decades, but what I can't understand is why Proton didn't take the opportunity to skip a few steps between generations one and two of the Saga.
Look at how far the Lancer has come. Remember, it was once the exact same size as the first Proton Saga. Now it's grown to roughly the size of a BMW 3 Series (which itself grew from a tiny, tiny car to something which can now accommodate five NBA players), and it's built on a platform so sophisticated that it's used to underpin anything from the Dodge Caliber hatchback to the Jeep Compass crossover, to Mitsubishi's own Outlander - which is also built with different styling for Citroen and Peugeot for sale in Europe.
Instead of the inoffensive but unexciting looks of the Saga, the latest Lancer has aggressive lines and a shark- nose front end that gives it the kind of flair that gets people hot about cars.
More to the point, with the Lancer you can have more airbags than you can count on the fingers of one hand, and it gets the maximum five star score in tough EuroNCAP crash tests.
In short, the Lancer is everything a modern and sophisticated car needs to be, which is what six generations of continuous improvement does for a car. What I don't understand is why, after all these years, the Saga is still just a cheap runabout.
I know it's meant for the rakyat, but surely we all deserve better than to have to squeeze ourselves into a car that remained in the same size class while its contemporaries moved up several notches?
When you look at the Saga, it's as if product planners only looked at rolling out a car to pick up where the original model left off. The thing is, everyone else has moved on, so why didn't Proton look at what the Lancer had graduated to when planning the first Saga's replacement? It would have been the most obvious example to consider, surely.
Car development from model-to-model always follows the same path anyway: bigger, more feature-packed and safer. Given the 23 year gap between Saga generations, why not skip forward to where the competition is today instead of looking at where the Saga came from?
Copycat engineering doesn't doom a carmaker to failure or mediocrity if it is willing to move on and keep pace with the rest of the world. Just look at BMW and Nissan.
The Saga and Lancer remind me of the 1988 comedy Twins, starring Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twin brothers who grew up into very different specimens, one runty and unattractive and the other one big and strong. Guess which one the Saga is.
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