PERHAPS one of the more mystifying priorities of Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is his almost near obsession, since his return as the nation’s leader, with a new national car project.
There is no doubting his conviction that the engineering prowess a national car project supposedly engenders is one of the keys to the nation’s emergence as a modern state.
Dr Mahathir made general references to the arrival of the era of electric cars, which will eventually also run autonomously, suggesting that he is far from trying to relive an era of economic greatness built on heavy or mass industrialisation.
This is mystifying because in the new era of greater political openness and accountability that he himself has just engineered, Dr Mahathir appears determined to plough ahead with the car project despite almost universal disapproval from the moment he re-introduced the idea.
He has sought lately to rationalise the idea by suggesting that popular disapproval is the result of the gap between popular and government aspirations. In a sense, he is right.
Most Malaysian car owners had thought that after decades of putting up with Proton cars, they would have been liberated of their national service to Proton.
More national service then to a Proton successor?
The answer, thus far, has been an almost resounding and unequivocal “no”.
Malaysians might have quietly fumed and resented that the only car many of them could afford for a long time was a Proton.
That they quickly shifted to heavily-taxed, foreign-made sedans, or even made do with re-conditioned ones, as soon as they could afford to do so was a stinging rebuke to and an indictment of our long-protected national automaker.
But that Malaysians have also put up, grudgingly, with our Proton-centred universe suggests we cannot be persuaded on patriotic grounds for justified good reasons.
We cannot but help notice that in almost the same time Proton has been in existence, South Korean and Japanese cars had taken global markets by storm.
In fact, the trajectories of their cars’ progression were almost identical with their national trajectories from developing to developed-country status.
It is, of course, well and good that Dr Mahathir again takes to urging Malaysians to emulate the work ethic and cultural ethos of the Japanese and other East Asians.
But these East Asians are almost unique in having almost completely homogeneous national populations that are far more easily persuaded to work for the good of the nation.
Ours, on the other hand, is an almost uniquely heterogeneous nation that is struggling to
cohere to a single national identity.
The failure of Proton suggests that the attempt to transcend our cultural diversity through an appeal to overarching economic imperatives can be a costly economic exercise.
The Proton experience demands that we find out right from the outset the estimates of what another national car project will cost us in terms of capital costs, grants or subsidies, monetary sacrifices Malaysians will be called upon to shoulder again by being made or encouraged to buy them, and for how long such a state of affairs will go on.
Equally pertinent, but perhaps more difficult, may be finding the answers to the total cost in lost opportunities and efficiencies in other areas and sectors as we divert and devote resources and attention to another national car project.
At the end of the day, we must be able, with good conscience, to tell not just ourselves but to answer on behalf of our children and grandchildren if all those costs are worth paying for.
And if so, whether the great benefits of a successful national car project will materialise and we will be second-time lucky.
The odds may, indeed, be too great.