what are all the locallymade cars nowadays? and whats ur fav? been away a few years, so donno whats up over there. What are they? How much do they cost? etc?
Various cheap crap sold at vastly inflated prices. Favourite? None, really. Not much to choose between them. Either crap, shite, or maybe Toyota, which is very slightly less crap than the others. The ONLY reason anyone would think of buying one is if they can’t afford anything else. I swear. The ONLY reason.
TBH, some of the locally assembled offerings are not that stupidly priced when you look at the trim level. If you look at the same model offered in (say) the US, you’ll see they are cheaper but everything you take for granted here is an option there. Power windows, a/c, leather seats, chrome trim etc. are considered base level here. You cannot sell anything but the cheapest econobox in Taiwan without these features.
Put another way, the US market recognizes as an econobox something a Taiwanese will pretend is some kind of luxury car… and pay extra to have tarted up to help with the pretense.
To be fair, the local car manufacturers have come a long way in the past 10 years or so. The quality has improved exponentially. One thing that hasn’t changed is the appalling car maintenance that dealerships do.
What redwagon said about the different trim levels offered in local cars is very much true. 90% of cars sold here have all of the options in the book. You get to pick the color, and perhaps 3 levels of trim at most. On the Korean car front, the locally made Hyundais are actually of better quality than the ones made in Korea. 
[quote=“Nonsequitur”] On the Korean car front, the locally made Hyundais are actually of better quality than the ones made in Korea. :p[/quote]Nonsequitur -
This is saying quite a bit. In the USA Hyundai has gained a very strong base by offering a 10 year/100,000 mile full warranty. And they been putting cars on the roads that are top quality and very competitively priced.
Of course this QC upgrade came about after a few disastrous model years.
[quote=“Nonsequitur”]One thing that hasn’t changed is the appalling car maintenance that dealerships do.[/quote]Too true. You get three kinds of service at dealers. Consistently poor, inconsistent, and shockingly incompetent. Take your pick. :s
This is why, I think, Toyota keeps coming up trumps. Service is just better.
Of course, otoh, the owners do have a bad habit of taking their cars to Ah-huang down the street, the one with the signs of a hundred manufacturers on his billboard, and not one single manual or factory service tool at hand… You might not get what you pay for, but you sure aren’t going to get something you didn’t.
Pay no attention to me. I’m just bitter and cynical. I wanted to get a scarlet two-seater Alfa convertible. What did we end up with? A monkey-shit brown Sentra. Sorry, “champagne.” 
Still, 7 years on and it hasn’t given us any problems yet – apart from being a boring heap of shite, of course.
If the old lady had let me, we would have bought a blue truck: a scratched up old dirty one with urban assault scars all over it. For a driving environment like Taiwan, it seems like just the thing, and damn convenient too. Trouble is, I hardly ever drive and the wife doesn’t want to be seen in a blue truck, so there you have it.
[quote=“TainanCowboy”]Nonsequitur -
This is saying quite a bit. In the USA Hyundai has gained a very strong base by offering a 10 year/100,000 mile full warranty. And they been putting cars on the roads that are top quality and very competitively priced.
Of course this QC upgrade came about after a few disastrous model years.[/quote]
That’s what saved Hyundai in the USA. They have become pretty reliable. What I actually meant was that the fit and finish of the locally made Hyundais are better. All you have to do is open and close the doors. 
I’ll take my truck…It’s just high enough to run over the top of nearly every lowered ricer 
[quote=“sandman”]I wanted to get a scarlet two-seater Alfa convertible.[/quote]Dude, my first car in Taiwan was a red 2dr Alfa. Biggest mistake of my life. Well, certainly in the top 10. Bloody thing almost bankrupted me. Don’t be too upset.
The Mazda 3 Sport package looks nice, if you’re looking for something small but sporty.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]The Mazda 3 Sport package looks nice, if you’re looking for something small but sporty.[/quote]:roflmao:
Sry. That’s just hilarious, given the ragging the car has been getting in the other thread. 
[quote=“Nonsequitur”]To be fair, the local car manufacturers have come a long way in the past 10 years or so. The quality has improved exponentially. One thing that hasn’t changed is the appalling car maintenance that dealerships do.
What redwagon said about the different trim levels offered in local cars is very much true. 90% of cars sold here have all of the options in the book. You get to pick the color, and perhaps 3 levels of trim at most. On the Korean car front, the locally made Hyundais are actually of better quality than the ones made in Korea. :p[/quote]
i heard hyundai is made by the guys that used to make HOnda in taiwan. OH by the way< could someone enlighten me as to what brands and models and prices are available (taiwan assembled) now?
my info is years old.
and has the warranty improved? way back when it was just 30 days or 1000 kilometers. As opposed to the usual 3 years or 36,000 miles warranty in the USA. Premium brands offer 4 years or 50,000 miles here usually.
p.s. i had a Ford Telstar (mazda 626 in the rest of the world) from 87 to 99. It was great and i got bout 460,000 KM out of it. but it costs quite a bit of money after the first five years. IN total i think i spent bout the cost of the car in maintenance and parts . So it would have been better to get rid of it after five years or so, rather then spend all that money for keeping it running.
lets see, i went thru something like 9 sets of tires, 5 sets of shocks (taiwan potholes), replaced just bout all the suspension parts and pieces MANY times. Then engine never gave me any trouble and i also forgot to change the transmission oil for the first 260,000 KM, but it kept working well. The body fell apart. The engine, tranny never gave me any grief. Everything else? REPLACED and /or repaired often, especially the doggone aircon system. Always on the fritz.
[quote=“redwagon”][quote=“Dragonbones”]The Mazda 3 Sport package looks nice, if you’re looking for something small but sporty.[/quote]:roflmao:
Sry. That’s just hilarious, given the ragging the car has been getting in the other thread. [/quote]
Oh? 
Ok, I’ll go look. Mine was a very superficial reaction, not something knowledgeable, so :raspberry: 
The Mazda 3 seems to be holding its own in this thread, including your opinion, so I’m not sure which thread you mean. :help:
By looks nice, I just mean aesthetics. Styling. I prefer it to the Focus at first glance. I haven’t done the thorough review bit. It’s small, sporty, and just sexy enough to catch the eye. The way I like my girls. I mean girl.
Just joshing you. We were having a go at the usual Taike scum that buys the 3. The thread about German plates drifted into Mazda-bashing.
Hey, taike scum wear pants too. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna suddenly stop wearing pants. 
I’m quite happy with my Ford MAV (2L). It does the job it was designed for quite well… being a family car, with a little pep for when I’m driving alone… It’ll out run crappily modded civics and galants quite easily… and i’ve kept up with a 4g63 powered lancer and a rather heavily modded pug 205 on the freeway up to 175 (at which point we spotted flashing lights ahead and felt we should slow down)… it handles well, is roomy and comfy, though i’d like to stiffen up the suspension a bit…
had a slight issue with the original battery, and two center caps have fallen out from the rims… ummm… my front right speaker has died (gotta pull the door apart and find out what happened - maybe a component just fell loose)
but, if i were planning on getting a “toy” car (an affordable one - else it’d be a ferrari or something), i’ve got my eyes on the sunny 303… they have no idea how to tune them here, and i’d love to show them the true potential of said car… i know being an old taiwan-built car, it’s not great quality… but since quite a few parts are going to be replaced, i don’t see that as an issue
:roflmao: Sry. That’s just hilarious, given the ragging wearing pants has been getting in the other thread…
oh… hang on… sorry… that thread was over on my he-bitch-man-whore forum… 
my favourite car in Taiwan?.. any car that is stationary and legally parked in a legitimate parking spot… Before I came here I had an above average interest in cars, I knew the specs of most cars that were interesting, I’d stop to look at a nice M3 at the lights or whatever… I dreamed and schemed of getting an R32 Golf… in short I was a pseudo car buff… fast forward to today and the land where there are no roads worth driving on anywhere on the West coast, all the roads you’d have to take to get to the nice roads are bottleneck city, the land where even in a Ferrari you sit in the line and watch the traffic lights cycle through the third red light as the fools in front of you jockey for position as they all try to turn left from the right lane and vice versa, where 99.9% of drivers are incompetent life threatening cretins that single cell organisms would look down on as being a bit crass and somewhat thick, the land where everywhere is a parking lot, even if it’s the fast lane, the land where millions of tiny little men with very fragile egos careen around drunk on the temporary power of being in control of 2 tons of fast moving metal, wielding their rubbish sedans with a half crazed Napolionic fury, that no man had better interfere with or god forbid, overtake gasp…
To top it all off someone in “government” decided that the daily dance with death of making your way through lethally incompetent city traffic just isn’t dangerous enough and added some clause to the constitution whereby road workers are apparently trying to recreate the surface of the moon and/or post war Bosnia on Taiwan’s road surfaces… roving teams of one third pissed, one third wired on Taurine, one third clinically retarded road crews, with a gleefully sadistic enthusiasm for installing manhole covers either 3 inches above or 3 inches below the road surface, slicing up huge swathes of road for no apparent reason, only to patch it up in the most half arsed manner imaginable, so that for the first month you loose your fillings clattering over these temporary speed humps, before they subside 6 inches below the road surface over night and you destroy your shocks the next morning hitting the ditch… Then as a final coupe de gras they apply road markings that lure you to certain flaming death since as you drive straight remaining in your lane, as soon as you pass an intersection, the road markings suddenly all change, placing you half in the path of oncoming traffic and half in the bus lane…
So to make a long story slightly longer, Taiwan has taken the passion I once had for cars and like an Sicilian grandma drying a shirt after washing it in a river, wrenched, twisted and extracted every last drop of it out of me, before smashing me against the rocks and leaving me out to dry… sad but true…
I’d like to nominate that one for Classic Post status.