Quote Originally Posted by niky View Post
That's why you have to use transplanted technology, at least, at first. Using "Isuzu" or "Mitsubishi" parts goes a long way to assuring the public that spares will be easily had.

The most you can build here is the body. The one problem is the cost-economics factor... to build a body at competitive cost with the Chinese, you have to produce at least 40,000 units from the same die. Finding that kind of volume locally, for a start-up, is damn difficult. It's doable in China... but here, we don't even have the volume to support sales of 40,000 L300 FBs.

Perhaps we should have some sort of paradigm shift here in looking at what the utility vehicle ought to be.

about two years before the coke tri wheelers delivery vehicle came out I was trying to put together enough funds to come up with such a tri-wheeler utility vehicle that I was aiming to market to certain organizations that I knew needed such cost efficient vehicles in terms of maintenance cost and acquisition.

Ourt cost estimates then was a production cost of 25 - 50 k per unit depending on add-ons for certain usages and our selling price would be around 50 - 65 k.

In Katmandu, the tri-wheeler six passenger electric jeepneys was a hit.

It is simple to build and the overhead cost can be minimixed with an innovative organizational structure.