Quote Originally Posted by orly_andico View Post
Actually, I have a pretty good idea why the CHOK prototype never made it into production. Because almost all Filipino industries lack capital. That's all there is to it.
Actually there is more to it. A lot of Filipinos have the "we are not good enough" attitude. This has been clearly expressed over and over in this thread alone. Even with an unlimited capital, anyone with that kind of attitude will never succeed in venturing beyond his or her comfort zone, which typically is working for a big company. After all, as a follower (instead of being a trailblazer or a pioneer) you will never have to contend with brickbats, insults, jokes or arrows at your back thrown by those too timid to tread ahead of you and instead chose to rationalize their timidness via such thinking.

I think it's pretty clear that the PhUV being discussed in this thread will not be a "world beater." So there's no need to grind that point in. It will be.. adequate. But for many people that's good enough.
Thanks for reiterating this point. That is what we have been saying all along. As to why some people never get the point is beyond me.

Whether it will be good enough to survive the market.. is another issue entirely.
Yes, whether it will be good enough to survive in the market is another issue entirely but an important issue nevertheless that we need to and will be addressing. As it is, at this point, we are not even sure we will reach the prototype production phase. But that has not stopped us from planning things through all the way to distribution to after-market servicing. After all, the whole exercise is paving the road for future generations. If for some reason we fail to reach the end of our objectives, hopefully others will continue our efforts.

I must say, the Toyota Avanza has many, many of the qualities desirable in a PhUV. So did its predecessor, the Tamaraw FX.
So do a lot of models out there that have qualilities desirable in a PhUV. And we are trying to pick out the pertinent ones and add them into our own design. After all, the benefit of starting from scratch is that we don't have to contend with legacy or excess baggage (even in terms of corporate structure or the distribution value chain) although admittedly we do have to work within the limitations of current available technology.

I think the most realistic way to look at the PhUV is that.. it is a jeepney. Although without jeepney sheet metal. I saw a bunch of jeepneys in a showroom along EDSA near Balintawak last Holy Week. They had price billboards on them, 200K each. Of course with a surplus engine. Don't the Chinese have their own versions of the 4D56? I believe the 4D56 is already Euro-1 or Euro-2. That would be a great improvement over the jeepney.
The jeepney actually shares significant classical design lines with more luxurious models (Range Rover, FJ Cruiser, Wrangler, even the Hummer), having descended from the original Jeep. It is actually a testimony to the lack of any automotive design industry in the Philippines as to how the jeepney ended up with its current profile vis-a-vis other related models.

Yet Filipinos are considered to be world class in so many design/arts disciplines (furniture, computer graphics, animation, dance, singing, etc.). Thus it can be deemed an anomaly that we haven't yet made our mark in automotive design, whatever the circumstances may have been. It is this anomaly that our little project is trying to rectify.