Driving Tomorrow, from Tokyo

Of the several international motorshows that media, industry players, and car enthusiasts all over the world flock to, Tokyo’s has got to be the most exciting for the South East Asian region. While Shanghai and Thailand each have their own motorshows, both of which garner large crowds, Tokyo has been around the longest and has often been a bellwether of things to come from Japan’s automobile manufacturing industry. And since automobile manufacturing is one of Japan’s core industries, accounting for 16% of the total value of that country’s manufacturing shipments (a 2002 figure) and employing a total of 4.91 million people (or 8.2% of Japan’s working population) working to build cars for sale all over the world, you can count on the Japanese to pull out all the stops at their premiere event.

Ironically, for a nation that depends a lot on its car industry, it actually works quite efficiently, not on a million or so cars, but on trains. Congested Tokyo with its army of salarymen and salarywomen goes to work everyday and keeps the economy humming via an enviable network of trains that make our own MRT look anemic by comparison.

Traveling to the 39th Tokyo Motorshow with Mitsubishi Motors Corporations’ AVP for Marketing Services Froilan Dytianquin and Senior Vice President for Marketing Division’s Mel Dizon, it was a pleasant 60-minute ride via train to the Makuhari Messe convention center where the more than 239 companies from all over the world showed off their wares. Taxi and parking fares are hideously expensive in Tokyo, but trains are much more reasonable and all over the place, hence even top-ranked executives of Tokyo ride the trains on a daily basis.

To get to Makuhari (in Chiba City) from our hotel in Shinagawa District, we only had to cross the street to the huge station which serves as a hub for several lines from the cheap subway to the business-class Shinkansen "bullet train". Everything is automated and efficient, from the ticketing machine to the right-on-time arrival and departure of the trains. To illustrate how much more efficient the trains are, a train ride from Akihabarra to Shinagawa (about 20 kilometers) only costs around P80 and about 15 minutes travel time, whereas a taxi ride will reach around P2,000 and up to 60 minutes in rush hour traffic. The country makes a living on cars, but depends a lot on trains for day-to-day operations. Now there’s a lesson for our car-dependent working population.

Once you do get to Makuhari Messe whether by car or train, be prepared to be amazed, not to mention tired from a lot of walking. The convention center covers an area of some 40,000 square meters, and it took me two days to fully see every exhibit, booth, car, motorbike, and other strange concepts on display. This year’s target was 1.5 million visitors, and so the show was open for 17 days. Two of those are for the press, and the second day is also open for people in wheelchairs. Otherwise, they’d likely suffer from the crush of visitors on public days.

How does one fully experience an event like this? You will need a digital camera with at least 512MB of memory, a spare battery, comfortable shoes, and enough yen for merienda — around 3,000. Then you start walking and snapping pictures. Mitsubishi Motors was quite upbeat this year, showing off its Lancer Evo and Pajero Paris-Dakar race cars, but more significant were its mass-market automobiles: the new generation Outlander (set to debut on our roads in 2007), the "i" show car, the Concept-D:5 concept van, and the outrageous Concept-X.

We’ll write more extensively about these cars in this week’s Wheels, but the "i" is a smarter, cuter iteration of the Smart mobile that’s only a few steps away from mass production, the Concept-D:5 is a harbinger of what the next generation L400 Space Gear will look like in a few years, and the Concept-X is… well, it’s just crazy. It’s like a cross between a Lancer and an Eclipse sports coupe, runs on a twin-cam, turbocharged MIVEC engine (with nitrous!), and has 4 racing seats installed. Those Evo engineers must be the crown jewels of Mitsubishi right now, but just to show their solidarity with the alternative fuel crowd, they also showed off an "electric Evo": a Lancer Evo IX with a lithium-ion battery system and 4 in-wheel motors with max power of 270PS. At the dinner for our small Philippine delegation of media and dealers, Mitsubishi Motors Philippines was therefore quite optimistic about its product lineup for the next several years.

Elsewhere, Nissan created a stir with CEO Carlos Ghosn gracing the opening while its cars vied for best-of-show honors: the GT-R Proto (the next generation Skyline a few years from final production), the Foria sports car concept, the Amenio concept van, and the queer Pivo, a three-passenger buggy with a bubble cabin that pivots on top of its chassis to eliminate reverse-parking jitters.

At the Honda area, the next-generation Civic sedan drew a lot of attention as it’s set to debut in here soon, while Daihatsu and Suzuki impressed with their fetching lineup of subcompact hatchbacks and sports cars, one of which resembled a 2/3rds scale Mazda Miata, while another was a much more spacious interpretation of the Mini. For truly high-end firepower, BMW showed off a concept Z4 coupe and the M5 and M7 uber-sedans, but was trounced by Audi’s unveiling of the S8 luxury sports sedan and its magnificent "Shooting Brake Concept" — a 4-door hatchback that looks like an Audi-fied BMW 1-series.

Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Maserati were all in attendance, but didn’t seem to attract as many people as the more affordable brands with their respective takes on 21st century fuel and space efficiency and driving fun. At least every other manufacturer showed off an alternative-fuel vehicle. "Driving Tomorrow" was the 39th Tokyo Motorshow’s slogan, and from the looks of the dozens of concepts and show cars that took us all of two days to thoroughly go over, tomorrow will address the oil price crisis concerns while still giving a large measure of enjoyable driving and ownership.

Here are some Backseat Driver comments from last week.

To the MMDA and LTO, please apprehend and levy high penalty to smoke belchers on the road and also those who use sidestreets as repair shops. — 09198511150

To the owners of cars, be extra aware of the services performed on your car even at the casa. They can put back parts that they broke during service. — 09198544351

Traffic at the corner of Del Pan in Manila is terrible due to the queue of PUJs. There is a new sidestreet in the area that they could use but it’s only utilized as a junkyard/playground. — 09178850113

Dong, Ford Focus RS 300hp turbo, not local Focus Sport goes against Subaru WRX! — Albert Dacer, Bacolod City. (Thank you for being so attentive to details, Mr. Dacer. I did place it in the article in parenthesis that it was the street versions of those cars that the Focus Sport competes against.)

I’m a doctor and I just had three separate emergency calls for motorcycle head injuries, all within 24 hours! — 09173942746

There are fuel saving gadgets in the market. I’m using a 1.8 Revo automatic. Are they really worth it? Which one yell best fuel saving result? — 09196377017 (Sorry, we don’t have technical data on all fuel savings devices.)

Why don’t you try earning a day’s wage as PUV driver by strictly obeying rules? Compare your earnings with a PUV "road barbarian". It’s the cutthroat boundary system that force PUV drivers to be "road barbarians". — 09196630247 (I didn’t single out any individual or group as road barbarians — sorry if I touched a sensitive nerve. Just the same, I certainly agree that the boundary system is also partly to blame for insane driving practices among some road users. Our column’s argument against the boundary system was printed a few months back, in case you missed out on it.)

Sanctions? Yes! But if the boundary system isn’t changed, PUV drivers will still risk it. You would too if your pamalangke was at stake. — 09167242184 (Like I said, I agree with the inanity of the boundary system. I still say that we need more self-discipline as individual drivers, though.)

Container vans are illegally parked along the corner of Malingap and Kalayaan Streets in Teacher’s Village. — 09177965339

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Speak out, be heard and keep those text messages coming in. To say your piece and become a "Backseat Driver", text PHILSTAR<space>FB<space>MOTORING<space>YOUR MESSAGE and send to 2333 if you’re a Globe or Touch Mobile subscriber or 334 if you’re a Smart or Talk ’n Text subscriber or 2840 if you’re a Sun Cellular subscriber. Please keep your messages down to a manageable 160 characters. You may send a series of comments using the same parameters.