2010 proton gen-2 reviews

Proton GEN-2 Ecological Saloon 2010

Real value motoring these days is hard to find. Super economical diesels are not cheap to buy and as prices continue to rise, the Captain Sensibles amongst us are just not well catered for. Toyota and Honda hybrids with their monster ’power station sized’ batteries are heavy and cost lots of cash - and if you want a Vauxhall or Volvo that runs on LPG/petrol you pay more than for the petrol only powered equivalent. - This is not nice at all when we should all pull together to save the planet. Spending to save doesn’t really make much sense in my book - so it was refreshing indeed to find that Proton sell their dual fuel cars at no extra premium. Such philanthropy and lack of avarice and greed has gone largely unnoticed by the buying public - so I cannot make too strong a case for raising the profile of this Malaysian marque. As a struggling motoring ’hack’ I ’m always jolly pleased when the test car is wallet friendly, so I was delighted to discover that when it was time to fill up the GEN2 4Dr. Saloon with LPG I only had to pay 64P/litre. Even the car is something of a bargain. It’s a Focus sized 1.6 saloon for just £10,995 - and whilst not being at the top end of the spectrum in terms of luxury or performance, it’s just a ’good’ car that is reasonably refined and that drives brilliantly - thanks to Lotus input into the chassis dynamics. ’Yes - But where do you put all that LPG?’ I hear you say. ’It will leave no boot space’. Well I’m pleased to be able to tell you that the gas tank is unobtrusive and takes up only about the same space as a spare wheel - so the boot capacity is still large. If truth be told, running on LPG (at the press of a switch) returns about 35 mpg which is about 7/8 mpg less than on petrol - but that still represents substantial savings and you can delight in the fact that you are not enlarging the Chancellors recession chest to quite the same levels as conventionally fuelled motorists are compelled to do. It’s quite pleasant, in fact, to see a stationary petrol gauge needle when you’re ’on the gas’. In real driving terms there’s no noticeable difference between driving it on petrol or on LPG. It’s not meant to be a high performance car so any attempt to measure the microseconds difference in acceleration is - quite frankly - silly. Suffice it to say that you or I won’t be able to tell the difference. So, eager to travel around cheaply on our great motorway network I pointed the car towards the M6: a fatal decision as it turned out, since I have to say that I had achieved a greater rate of knots on my own drive. As I joined the sluggish snail train of tin that represents the best that scintillating twenty first century motoring can offer in our Sceptred Isle I concluded that the gas would be better put to use in an antique dirigible where floating above the scrummage I could have stuck out my tongue, waggled my ears and gone ’Yah Boo!’ to it all. But I reflected that while I was waiting to extricate myself from the traffic, at least I wasn’t tearing up pound notes at quite the same rate as would have been the case were I not gas fuelled. As the Rock Music teacher might say, ’The experience with the Proton was a total gas.’ and interestingly there is every truth in the rumour that dentists are rushing to buy these Protons because they certainly make for fewer fillings.