Proton - Just a Cheap Mitsubishi?

tom-d

Proton, the car manufacturer have you ever heard of it or seen one? I had not until recently.......
Basically Proton is a Malaysian car maker which makes cars based on technology and parts from Mitsubishi'
There are not too many of them in Ireland but there are a good few in England.

The Protons are based on different Mitsubishi':
Proton Wira=Mitsubishi Lancer
Proton Satria=Mitsubishi Colt
Proton Putra=Mitsubishi Mirage

The protons are cheap, for example you can get a 2002 wira for around £1000 Proton Wira 2002

The Wira is popular among so called "Boy Racers" in Malaysia because of the interchangeability of parts with many Mitsubishi cars, including the Evo. Done up Wiras with Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution parts are fondly called "Wiralutions".



Does anyone own one, know some one who owns one, or ever driven one?


And would it be cool to drive a "Wiralution"?

Guy:Incognito

tom-d wrote: »

What are they like? (Performance, reliability, mpg etc.)

At a guess I'd say the Proton Wira is like the Mitsubishi Lancer
Proton Satria is like the Mitsubishi Colt
and the Proton Putra is like the.Mitsubishi Mirage

eringobragh

Stekelly wrote: »

At a guess I'd say the Proton Wira is like the Mitsubishi Lancer
Proton Satria is like the Mitsubishi Colt
and the Proton Putra is like the.Mitsubishi Mirage

Smartarse!! :rolleyes::rolleyes:

colm_mcm

they have some new models, like the Gen2. on the face of it, it's not a bad looking yoke

Like Hyundai did in the late 90's, Proton seem to have figured out how to do curves and have gone crazy on them. They own Lotus so they're supposed to handle quite well, and their CamPro CPS engine is similar to a VTEC or MIVEC in that it has 2 different cam profiles that change over in mid range. unfortunately the rest of the car is said to be quite poor.

tom-d

Good post to start off on ,colm mcm

Not a bad lookin yoke at all. looks like they've moved away from the Mitsubishi photocopy

any chance we could see them introduced to the irish market?

Tipsy Mac

About 10-15 years ago there were Proton dealers in Ireland, not sure what happened that they all died off.

bazz26

They had a GTi version of the Satria at one stage which was supposed to have been tweeked by Lotus afaik. It was based on the 1992 to 1996 Mitsubishi Colt:




They still sell RHD cars in the UK afaik but pulled out of the Irish market about 15 years ago, mainly due to only offering poorly build versions of Mitsubishi models that were 2 generations out of date from the 1980s.

Anyone remember this:

colm_mcm

check out the Toyota Caldina in the background! the old one was basically an Avensis estate. that's quite flash looking.

bazz26

colm_mcm wrote: »

check out the Toyota Caldina in the background! the old one was basically an Avensis estate. that's quite flash looking.

Almost stylish....:pac:

tom-d

that toyotas got the honda accord look to it!

colm_mcm

the other way around tom. the Caldina was out first!

JoeA3

My parents bought one of these new in 1991 and ran it for about 3 years. Looked similar to this, except theirs was a gold shade!



It was pretty much identical to the Mitsubishi Lancer of the mid-to-late 1980's. To be honest, I thought it was quite a nice car back in the day! Being Mitsubishi-based, it was also very reliable.

The biggest problem they had here was that they shared the same dealer network as Lada, obviously that was never going to be a good starting point to make a sales impact, so they fizzled out along with Lada before the mid 1990's.