R & D (Research and Duplicate) - Why don't we do it?

[niky]

Want a plan that might work?

First, build a motorcycle brand. Capture a big part of the market. That's possible because motorcycle buyers are cheap and more likely to buy crappy things that will break.

The trick is to over-engineer your bike so it won't.

After a few years, you've built a reputation for building cheap stuff that doesn't break. Go upmarket. Do big displacement bikes. Go laterally from there. Trucklets, mini-cars. Build a multi-market customer base. Build working capital. Hell... You aren't getting investors for a car start-up unless:

1. It's a sure thing... Which means you have to have proof of concept and expertise beforehand... Thus you should already be a manufacturer.

Or

2. It's an exciting toy that your jnvestors would buy themselves. Would the Rally Fighter have been as successful if it were a commuter car like the Spark? No. Look at all the start-ups with great concepts that have failed for lack of investor interest. The Aptera was the saddest one.

That's the long and short of it. To make a successful local car industry, you have to start from the bottom then work your way up. The PHUV was aiming straight for the middle... The most competitive and entrenched market segment. To try and build a consumer car also aims for the middle... For a class where customers are spoiled for choice and manufacturers sell at low margins to capture market share.

To understand what works, you should also understand what doesn't. The history of automobiles is littered with the corpses of hundreds of car-making concerns that simply failed. At the end of this decade, we will have dozens more. If you're planning to challenge the big boys, you'd better hope, like Iso, that you have a clever design (the Isetta) that others would like to license from you, or, like Alec Issigonis, you have a design that revolutionizes the industry to the extnet that your car is built straight on for forty years.