Thursday, June 28, 2007

Proton - QC

As we all know. Proton is notorious for bad QC. Don't get me wrong, this is not anohter post to bash Proton, but merely to highlight why we Malaysians are so forgiving.

Lets face it, Proton cars aren't the cheapest around. At almost RM30K for the most entry level car, it's still expensive for some. So, what do you get for RM30K anyway?

Look at both the pictures below. Both cars are the same variant, the Iswara "facelifted" version.


Silver


Black

To start with, notice how the parts are assembled? one of them is flushed to the edge of the car body, the other is, well...not so flush la.

If you are wondering why i showed both the pictures above, it was because if you do notice it, the black iswara's gap between the body and the boot door was really huge compared to the silver Iswara!


Silver Iswara : +/- 6mm gap


Black Iswara : +/- 8mm gap!!!

OK, much ado about that 2mm differences, but trust me, to the naked eyes, it's really really obscene! Fault me for being detailed with these things. But it speaks volume of how accurate the assembly lines is!

The Black Iswara was with WLM number plate and the Silver one was a WMB plate, giving them essentially about 9 months of differences in manufacturing date (going by the convention that KL plate moves by one alphabet within 3 weeks max).

I'm sure some of you had seen Proton cars door not being able to shut tight/flush with the body once it was closed. This again, is evidence of poor manufacturing standard!

I'm not saying that Proton is a bad manufacturer, other cars manufacturers has their defects as well, but not as often seen in them compared to Proton!

Now that the VW-Proton talk is back in order, i shudder to think that one day a VW Passat or even Golf assembled in Malaysia has these manufacturing imperfection (because it's not defect, but imperfection!)

ISO 9001:2000??? Give me a break!

Ps - i was waiting for wifey in the car when she was at the bank, so all i did was reverse and go forward and took both the car's picture at the same zoom level and distance...and as a contractor, i always have my measuring tape with me!

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