Quote Originally Posted by EVO-V View Post
That's a very low estimate for engine development. Billions of dollars go into development of a single engine family. Thing is a lot of car companies share engine technology to diffuse costs.

New factories are now designed to be quickly retooled for a group of vehicles as simply opposed to one model.

The alternative to jumpstart any auto industry is to purchase the old production line of a previous model, give it ridiculous subsidies and impose tariffs on imports. The circumstances, however, will not allow that from happening any more given free trade areas and regimes are in place.
The cost of development can be within just one or two hundred million, if you exclude the cost of tooling for manufacturing. As long as you sell it only to the ASEAN market and don't need to meet ridiculous CO2 and HCO emissions targets.

Buying an engine and upgrading it is possible. We could also purchase technology for things like cam-phasing from suppkiers like Delphi and fuel injection from Bosch or VM Motori, like many small manufacturers do.

Without punitive tarriffs, what we can do is provide big subsidies to locally owned and developed car manufacturers. Such a company would have to start with motorcycles... So it will have the production volume to support an R&D an engineering department.

Nobody will want to risk it, though.

Quote Originally Posted by Helios View Post
re the local boys involved in manufacturing auto parts, are they using compression molding for curved sections, or am i just smoking weed? given that we can produce an original, sleek contour body shell of a let's say a small sedan, and put on a stock chassis, engine etc., i suppose with a competitive price some will actually buy it. kit cars look like kit cars while mass market cars cost alot to make, so avoid these and focus on the niche market instead. the rally fighter (starts at around 2 million pesoses) was built with that in mind with no less than 10 local motors staff with off-the-shelf components. some companies sponsor other projects and the styling part is handled by the crowd-sourced-design community of which i'm part of. the phils can adopt the open innovation structure once it can gather at least 10 people who can do the job. capital and community, come up with these two components and possibly...
Rally Fighter works because there's a large community and some of them have money. How many buyers could you find here for a space frame toy that costs over two million pesos before sales tax?