Thank you very much for the help and advice. What you highlighted is very helpful.
Hohoho, I am not an automotive expert myself and asked my professor what is soft and hard technology. He says soft technology is knowledge technology as in how do you develop more engineers in the country or how you develop/retain skills, knowledge, and technology. For hard technology, it is infrastructure.
With your feedback, I fine tuned the survey and project it to 2020 as follows:
Most important regulation in the Malaysian passenger car industry:
- In 2020, the high taxes on passenger vehicles cause foreign firms to invest in local production facilities
- In 2020, the failure to abolish APs on passenger vehicles cause foreign firms to invest in local production facilities
- In 2020, the removal of petrol subsidies strongly affected the growth rate of passenger car sales
- Other better options: ___
High taxes on passenger vehicles I don't believe will cause the foreign manufacturers to invest in local production, not unless production costs can be substantially lower than other countries which by then would be technologically advanced enough to produce the vehicles and provide the necessary demand to make such investments viable - examples would be Vietnam or China both of which I think have underdeveloped automotive consumer markets in the sense that a large number of the population have yet to own their first car.
The AP problem is not something that can simply be abolished, simply because its not something that only affects cars. APs are issued by various ministries for businesses to import all sorts of products from Lexus to livestock. So the concept or AP system I don't think will be eliminated completely. Plus, APs do not cause manufacturers to sell less of their product - its their local distributor who loses out. A Mercedes brought in using an AP or through the local distributor is still a Mercedes made and sold by the company. How it comes into Malaysia and at what price I believe is more of a problem for official distributors as well as local producers who have to compete with currently more superior products.
The abolishment of fuel subsidies is inevitable. Initially, there will be a drop in sales as well as actual road use by consumers in a knee jerk reaction to price increases. However, in time people will come to terms with the price of fuel especially if the subsidies are withdrawn slowly over a prolonged period thereby putting an adjustment period into effect. Not to be overtly optimistic but it's not impossible or unlikely that salaries/incomes will rise in line with inflation not just relative to fuel but across the board. Of course, there will be some years when inflation rises faster but overall I sincerely hope we develop into the much talked about high income society of the future. But I don't think it will severely impact sales of cars but rather shift the demand towards fuel efficient, low cost vehicles such as those that run on alternative fuels like E85 and also hybrids. In a decade, I believe society as a whole will be more environmentally conscious as well and manufacturers have been seen to preempt this trend based on their R&D to produce electric cars, etc.
Would you please share your thoughts on these as well? Some of the points I don't agree with as being most important e.g. multi-modal transportation, but the PhD researcher assisting me is German and insist on it since I had no better input. Furthermore, do you think MPV would be important as well (since this point was not highlighted by me)? And do you think hybrid cars will work out? What happened to biofuel (with talks for so many years but nothing came out of it yet)?
I think biofuel will definitely play a huge part in determining the direction of the automotive industry as firstly the price of oil will NEVER go down, it will fluctuate within a certain range but in the long run the price can only move upwards. This is due to the fact that oil is finite and secondly the demand from countries like China, etc is hardly likely to slowdown anytime soon. However, which country produces the biofuel of the future remains to be seen as well. As I'm sure you know, corn is one of the crops which can be converted for use in automobiles however there is then a trade off between how much corn goes to food and how much to fuel to world's demand for biofuels. This of course will create all sorts of economic problems by countries who produce such crops who would have monopolies and indirectly create another OPEC only for biofuels this time.
Perhaps NGV could also play a part in propelling future automobiles. Currently, we have gas like methane, etc just seeping from the ocean floor so perhaps some research into what other gases lie at the bottom of our seas could yield something viable in the future. Let's face it, more people have been to space than to the bottom of the Marina Trench for example. The fuel of the future, in the form of gas could lie 10km below the waves. What seems unlikely now, will not be the case in the future. If I told you 20 years ago, we'd have Facebook, etc you'd think I was mad. So perhaps its worth considering that the 'game changer' has yet to even surface, quite literally.