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EP 17: John Stech: A visit to Taiwan sparks contemplation of national pride in the automotive industry
25 Plays25 days ago
This week John Stech, host of The Auto Ethnographer, was traveling in Taiwan. He was there to see his wife’s nephew graduate from high school. The five days on the ground were very busy, a packed schedule planned in advance. While there he was inspired to think about the pride that nations and their people feel about locally developed and produced automotive brands.
The visit started and ended in Taipei but much of the time was spent further south in the towns of Nantou, Puli, and Taichung, as well as at the stunningly beautiful Sun Moon Lake area in the Taiwanese mountains.
Urban and intercity transportation was primarily on rail, either the underground MRT or the incredibly fast HSR system (high speed rail). But the Nantou County was more spread out and required rented cars for the extended family. One of those cars was a LUXGEN n7 EV, a vehicle locally developed and produced by Yulon Motors with development cooperation by Foxtron (a part of FoxConn, known for producing Apple iPhones).
It became clear that the family member renting the LUXGEN was proud of the local brand. Well built, stylish, reliable, and packed with technology and a great battery range, the vehicle was certainly worthy of admiration.
John Stech speaks about LUXGEN, the perceived pride in the local automotive player, and the comparative experiences he had with local brands in Vietnam and Russia.
Join in for a short but thoughtful episode on the impact of national pride on a nation’s auto industry.
For more information about LUXGEN, visit the company’s site here (Mandarin Chinese): https://www.luxgen-motor.com.tw/
Learn more about Sun Moon Lake at their homepage: https://www.sunmoonlake.gov.tw/en/
To learn more about The Auto Ethnographer, visit the homepage at https://www.auto-ethnographer.com
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Auto Ethnographer. I'm John Steck, your host on this journey. We travel the globe to bring you stories about culture and the global automotive industry. Fasten your seatbelt and let's get started.
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 17 of the Auto Ethnographer. Unfortunately, i'm a day late delivering the episode, but that was because of a trip that I had to Taiwan this past weekend. I was inspired there to touch on a particular subject this week that is common across many of the countries that I have visited or lived during my lifetime.
00:00:34
Speaker
And that is the pride in the national automotive industry. So just to cut back to the personal side of it, my wife and I just returned from that trip to Taiwan to see her nephew graduate from high school.
00:00:47
Speaker
Congratulations, by the way, Francis, on your graduation. It was a very personal ceremony for the students and you could see their excitement in their eyes and you could see the respect that they possessed for their teachers.
00:01:00
Speaker
These were future scientists and leaders and artists and musicians, and now they were being honored and prepared for the next step in their lives to move on to the university studies.
00:01:12
Speaker
But let's get back to the subject of of the cars and the national pride in the automotive industry. There's a lot of talk about national pride in the news nowadays, but I wanted to focus on the automotive angle.
00:01:23
Speaker
Having a car industry, local manufacturing, and especially a local brand, usually is a signal that a country has, quote unquote, arrived. It means that it has joined the ranks of a relatively small number of developed nations that are able to master the complex task of designing, engineering, coordinating the supply chains and ultimately building their own automotive brands.
00:01:52
Speaker
Taiwan and its local automotive brand, LuxGen, gave me some pause for thought while I was in Taiwan. We spent five days total in Taiwan, two in Taipei, up in the north, and three further in the south, closer to the center of the island, in Nanto and Puli, as well as the wondrously scenic Sun Moon Lake, which is nestled among Taiwan's incredibly beautiful mountain landscape at the center of the island.
00:02:22
Speaker
Absolutely stunning landscapes. Our transportation while in Taiwan was absolutely seamless. We explored Taipei by MRT train, underground primarily, and had the occasional Uber drive.
00:02:39
Speaker
Then we headed south to Taichung with the electric high-speed rail nearing about 300 kilometers per hour, which cut down the travel time to literally only one hour.
00:02:50
Speaker
It was an incredibly fast and smooth journey down to the center of the island from a north-south perspective. Once in Taichung, our group, which included quite a large group of extended family, rented two cars.
00:03:04
Speaker
One of them was a locally designed and produced LuxGen N7 EV. e One of the family members, Danny, rented the Luxe Gen and I ended up riding in it with him for two days on mountain roads, city streets, highways.
00:03:22
Speaker
He was clearly proud of the car. He didn't own it. It wasn't his. It was a rental. But he was proud of it because he's Taiwanese and so is the car. It was locally developed and produced as an all-electric vehicle.
00:03:36
Speaker
I always love the backstory behind cars and and who makes them and who owns the company and so on. So let's talk about LuxGen for just a few moments. It's a Taiwanese car distributor and manufacturer, Yulon Motors.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yulon had historically been a contract manufacturers for other brands. They got their start with Willy's Jeeps, in fact, back in the 1950s. They also built a big reputation producing Nissans for decades.
00:04:06
Speaker
Ultimately, Yuland would establish manufacturing facilities in its native Taiwan, but also in China and in the Philippines. In 2008, they announced that they wanted to develop and produce their own vehicles locally and develop their own brand.
00:04:24
Speaker
As a result, the LuxGen brand was born. Initially, the company produced internal combustion powered vehicles starting in 2010. They exported actually quite widely around the world to Latin America, to Russia, Southeast Asia, and other developing markets.
00:04:43
Speaker
But in 2023, the company unveiled an all electric SUV, the N7. That's with a lowercase n and superscripted seven. This vehicle was co-developed with Foxconn, the famous Taiwanese company that is known for manufacturing Apple products such as the iPhone.
00:05:03
Speaker
The release of the SUV also coincided with the rebranding. The logo and the name of the company changed to a more clean design with all capital letters, LUXGEN, L-U-X-G-E-N.
00:05:16
Speaker
It was this N7 in which I spent my time driving around in Taiwan. I asked Danny quite a few questions about the LuxGen. It wasn't his own car, but clearly he was proud of Taiwan's national car brand.
00:05:31
Speaker
He was also interested in driving this all-electric vehicle, playing with the various settings and exploring the many features in the menus on the giant LED screen between the front seats.
00:05:42
Speaker
I think it was the sport mode and sudden change in speed and performance that entertained him the most. He was proud and confident in the quality of the car as well as in the battery range shown on the display.
00:05:55
Speaker
Something very important to us since we were staying at a very remote mountain location far from the nearest charging station. I could tell he was excited by my questions about the car and the company, especially since I was a car industry expert and he was my first host to introduce me to LuxGen.
00:06:14
Speaker
The N7 was quite impressive in its fit, its finish, its range, performance, and technology. It's definitely a product and a brand to be proud of in Taiwan.
00:06:26
Speaker
Hardly a surprise since it was developed together with the company Foxconn, ah who is also known, of course, for technology development and technology manufacturing.
00:06:38
Speaker
I've witnessed similar reactions to local brands in other countries. My personal experience of working among Vietnamese colleagues at Vinfast Automotive, which is Vietnam's first and only local automotive brand, showed me how national pride could fuel a local workforce with the desire to succeed and demonstrate their capabilities to other nations in the form of exports.
00:07:02
Speaker
my Vietnamese colleagues worked seemingly endless hours to make their local brand a success. I remember having many conference calls late in the evening going you know until midnight during that time working at VinFast, just with, again, an energy and a drive for success.
00:07:25
Speaker
My experience in Russia over a period of seven years was similar but also different. The local brands there, Avtovaz's Lada brand, Uaz, and the defunct Volga brand all had their histories dating back to the Soviet Union, decades.
00:07:44
Speaker
When compared to the modern cars being imported into Russia in the 2000s, while I was there, the local brands often became the butt of jokes.
00:07:55
Speaker
Only the lowest tier consumers would buy these due to their affordability. and they were not really aspirational at all. There was little trust in locally developed products by the Russians. i once showed my neighbor a Russian aviator or aviator watch that I had acquired.
00:08:16
Speaker
The back of the watch was glass, and you could see the many gears and the mechanisms working inside. It was pretty impressive, to be honest. My neighbor looked at me and said, we can make this in Russia?
00:08:30
Speaker
Such was the lack of faith in local products. But that's been changing by default over the years. Avta Vaz's Lada had learned improvements from its prior international owners, the Renault-Nissan Alliance.
00:08:44
Speaker
Slowly, their product has evolved and continues to evolve, evoking national pride as well. Again, ah big driving force. For large developed countries, this is nothing new.
00:08:58
Speaker
The Germans are fiercely proud of their highly engineered luxury automotive brands, the French of their creatively unique engineering, the Americans of their dominance in pickup trucks and large cars.
00:09:11
Speaker
But for smaller nations, it is their moment of arrival, a point of being amongst the elite with an automotive industry. As I gazed up, At the high school graduation, I wondered whether there were any future automotive designers, engineers, or marketers on the stage.
00:09:30
Speaker
For if there were, Taiwan's own automotive industry would continue to flourish with new, fresh, and creative talent. National pride, especially in the automotive industry, is a truly powerful force.
00:09:46
Speaker
Something i will continue to explore in future episodes when I talk to some guests who work for local brands in their nations.
00:09:57
Speaker
Until then, keep on driving.
00:10:01
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on today's journey. Please remember to like and subscribe to The Auto Ethnographer and leave us a rating or comment. For more information, visit our website at auto-ethnographer.com.
00:10:13
Speaker
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