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Disclaimer: Renault/Dacia is used purely as an example to illustrate this article. Other companies and cooperatives are doing similar things.
Pic by Renault SA
“Loo-ookingk de-eep into mine crys-sstal boll, I zee an eggziting new SUVee een yorr li-ife.”
The silly Romany (it's impolite to call caravan-dwelling itinerants Gypsies) fortune teller reference hints at Mioveni, a small town in Argeş county in Romania. It’s home to Dacia (pronounced “dah-sha”), Renault’s eastern European subsidiary. The factory was built in 1968 to produce mainly Renault products under licence, but with certain adaptations for local requirements. One such device, unforgettable by South Africans with long memories for the negative, was the Renault 12-based 1302 pickup produced between 1975 and 1982. Put politely, it was not nice and is best forgotten because things have improved greatly since then.
Renault bought the company in 1999 to give itself a manufacturing facility and labour pool within the burgeoning ex-USSR market. It turned out to be a brilliant tactic. Ordinary folk cannot afford the engineering-led wonder cars of today, so the only way to maintain volume is to manufacture more cheaply. This presents its own challenges, although it is possible to produce perfectly acceptable transport without having to charge the earth.
Tough economic times such as those being experienced now, led in many instances to the tail wagging the dachshund so to speak, with sales of inexpensive motors keeping companies, including Renault, in the black. Don’t get the idea that present-day products from Dacia are cheap and nasty. Far from it; you get good product with all you need. It’s just built economically by workers thankful to have meaningful employment.
This leads us to the new Duster’s three-star EuroNCAP safety rating. Adult and child protection levels are right up where they should be. It’s just that its strong and blunt front end isn’t friendly toward pedestrians, so the car was marked down. This highlights the build-to-cost quandary. Every must-have, costing ten euro to incorporate at factory level, requires a €10 cost cut elsewhere. It keeps engineers awake at night, but priorities are juggled, creative solutions are found and costs are contained. In this instance the message is possibly to be thankful your occupants are looked after; just be watchful and alert and avoid centre punching pedestrians.
Another obvious solution is to move production to an area where labour costs are low and output reliable; such as in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Brazil, China and India. South Africa used to be an option but sadly rampant inflation and unreasonable union demands have eroded its reputation. It isn’t alone, unfortunately.
As poorer people become middle class consumers, expectations rise and so do wage demands. It happened in Europe, Japan, the US and the UK after the effects of WWll wore off. It happened here as a political tool; both pre- and post-democratisation and it’s happening in China as the country opens itself to the world.
Unless we can find a way to return to the kind of inflation-free stability we knew decades ago and corporate greed is contained, ordinary people will find it difficult to become, and remain, mobile.
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SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8