If I am to drive a car, I should drive a fuel efficient and low maintenance car. Therefore, I should learn from the examples of some of our state executive members who ended up trading in their Protons for Mercedes E200. According to this article, there are many advantages of the Mercedes:
- In the long run, Mercedes cars are cheaper to maintain and could also save us fuel costs.
- The cars could also fetch a high market price when sold as second-hand cars.
It could be true that the older model Protons may be less well engineered and may cost quite a lot in long term maintenance. The Perdana models were design prior to the purchase of Lotus. The article cited the example of the Proton Perdana of state Commerce, Industry and Environment committee chairman Toh Chin Yaw, which has twice undergone expensive repairs to the tune of RM50,000 in the last 36 months.
They ended up paying only RM 245,000 for each Mercedes, which is very cheap. I guess they must be able to buy it without any import duties, for official use. Assuming that it costs RM 50k to maintain a Proton every 3 years, these babies would pay for themselves after 15 years of continuous use, without any maintenance. Add in another 5 years if we factor in maintenance.
But I already drive a low maintenance, highly fuel efficient car suitable for long distance drives. In the short 5 years that I had use the car, I had already driven it more than 100,000 km. A single tank of fuel, which costs about RM50 (RM75 now), can bring me from KL to Penang. I challenge the Mercedes to beat that!
In terms of maintenance, I spent about RM150 every 5,000 km for regular service and about RM500 for replacing some parts, after about 20,000 km. This comes to about RM5,500 in total maintenance for 5 years. The car is a Proton and the parts and service centres are easily found throughout the country.
In case anyone is wondering, my car used to be a Proton Iswara 1.3L. At the time that it was bought, it cost about RM30,000 or so. Oh, and you should not look down on the crash-ability of the Proton. My car had so many bumps and scratches on it, as a testament to its survivability.
PS: When I go home, I plan to “upgrade” my car to something that’s more fuel efficient. I wonder if they will sell the Tesla Roadster in Malaysia. It is the one pictured above and is partly designed by Lotus anyway. Otherwise, I’ll just go for a Perodua.
Sybreon Ones Nought 
well, jap cars are very fuel efficient and cheap to maintain. that’s why mine is, after doing some costs-benefits analysis. and of course, they cost significantly less.
used to drive a wira, and realised it cost more to drive that than a vios due to maintanence and fuel cost … >.<
new honda city coming out soon!
Yea get a Vios or a city 🙂 I have a vios too, only problem is with the power window, apparently the motor part is locally made by the same manufacturer as proton’s, but i got it replaced free of charge anyway (within the warranty period).