Self-owned brands should be supported by clear-cut technical orientations

Self-owned automobile brands which have fought for survival in the past decades seem to leapfrog recently: SAIC has announced to produce 50,000 such cars by 2007, based on models from MG Rover and Ssangyong; FAW said its high-end Red Flag HQ3 cars, employing the Toyota technology, will produce 500,000 units by 2009. This is good news but something concrete should be behind it. The question is: what do the self-owned brands compare to. Is it Made in Japan which means conserved energy, or…