Even before its launch, Proton’s latest Inspira sedan was the subject of controversy with some quarters accusing the national car maker of back pedaling towards the early Proton days of rebadging Mitsubishi models as its own.
At a special media briefing held at Proton’s Centre of Excellence last week, the Inspira’s project manager Zulkifli Bidin took the opportunity to clarify several matters.
He said the Waja replacement model originally started out as a joint development project between the national car maker and Mitsubishi Motors Corp some three years ago.
The project was supposed to be on a joint platform development and sharing basis.
“Under the project, Mitsubishi and Proton will then use their very own upperbody designs on the new platform which will result in two very distinctive models.
“But because of the economic downturn, Proton decided to defer the project but Mitsubishi carried on with the platform and upperbody development which became the Mitsubishi Lancer,” he said.
Rather than to restart the project from scratch, Proton decided to use the Lancer as a new start point while adding value to an already good design.
Zulkifli said Mitsubishi was willing to allow Proton to rebadge the Lancer as the Inspira without changing any key features.
“We felt that our engineers who had trained under our subsidiary Lotus Engineering were able to improve the driving dynamics and handling of the Lancer,” he said.
After convincing Mitsubishi that Proton could improve on Lancer’s driving performance, Mitsubishi gave the green light to the suspension tweaking.
Among the improvements were revised suspension rating and bushings for a more comfortable ride and the incorporation of thicker anti-roll bars for better cornering stability.
Others improvement work include closer body gaps of 2.5mm compared with 3mm in the Lancer, and reduced levels of noise, vibration and harshness.
“Even when our products are good, people will still say they are not good enough because we are Proton. So, we have to be better,” Zulkifli said.
Proton had shipped five Inspira sedans produced by its factory for crash testing in Japan to ascertain its crash worthiness and safety features.
“At our Shah Alam factory production lines, Mitsubishi have stationed its engineers to ensure that the Inspira were produced in accordance to Mitsubishi’s quality standards,” he said.
Even Mitsubishi Motors Corp’s top management team, consisting of its head of research and development, DCGM of Asean and master vehicle evaluator who came to Shah Alam to test the Inspira, have praised Proton for work done on returning the suspension system for better comfort and handling.
“They told us that Inspira offered better ride handling characteristics and noise, vibration and harshness isolation compared with the Mitsubishi Lancer,” Zulkifli said.
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