27 years of writing a motoring column

As the Inquirer is celebrating its 28th anniversary this month, my editor discovered that I’ve been writing for the Inquirer Motoring section for 27 years.  So at the risk of revealing my true age (I can always claim that I began writing for the section when I was 18!)  I’m complying with the request of Jong Arcano, Inquirer Motoring editor since 2009, that I write something about those 27 years in Motoring.

 

Sometimes people ask how I came to write about cars and motoring.  When the Inquirer began publishing as a daily broadsheet in 1985 with founder Eugenia D. Apostol as editor in chief, I transferred my weekly consumer column from the Manila Bulletin to the Inquirer.  After a year, noticing that I often wrote about cars, Eggie Apostol suggested, why not write a motoring column instead? The idea to write a consumer-oriented motoring column, focusing on quality, safety, fuel efficiency and value for money, was appealing and so “On the Road” was born.

 

Today I have at home dusty folders containing clippings of my column dating back to 2002.  The 1986-2001 clippings are stored in a box somewhere in a closet, but I don’t have the time to look for them.  But judging from the clippings on view, the Inquirer did not censor my copy when I wrote about consumers’ unpleasant experiences with cars or poor after-sales service, e.g., “A wrenching experience,” (2/28/02); “A slide in quality,” (4/18/02); “A car manufacturer’s worst nightmare,” (12/4/03);  “A sensational roof-crush case,” (7/29/04); “Honda’s ‘mea culpa’,” (6/29/05); “O-rings and preventive maintenance,” (8/2/06); “Car insurance woes,”  (1/10/07); “‘A violent change’ and ‘a punch in the face,’” (7/16/08 and 7/17/08); “It’s not just the floor mats or the gas pedal, folks,” (12/2/09); “A consumer’s view of Toyota’s never-ending story,” (2/10/10); “Testing unsafe cars in emerging markets,” (2/29/12); and “A deadly double standard on safety,” (6/19/13).  Apparently, the car companies affected took the criticism in good faith and still advertise in the Inquirer.

 

Columns with a positive outlook on cars outnumbered the negative ones, however.  Test-driving new cars here and abroad provided lots of material for the column.  To test their new products or to attend conferences or auto shows, car manufacturers invited me and many other motoring journalists to places like Germany, Italy, Dubai, South Korea, Beijing, Shanghai, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Japan. Local destinations I have driven to include Cebu, Antique, Baguio, Ilocos Norte, Batangas, Cavite, Laguna and of course, Clark and Subic. I attended every Tokyo Motor Show, a biennial event, from 1989 up to 2013 except 2011.  I also got to attend the Shanghai Formula One Grand Prix twice, once as a paddock pass guest of BMW and then as a Ferrari hospitality suite guest of Royal Dutch Shell, which fuels Ferrari F1 cars. Whenever I traveled to Canada and the United States to visit my daughters and late sister before she died, and had the chance to drive in those places, I also wrote about those road trips.

 

Aside from test drive reports and motor sports, the rapidly evolving new technologies related to automobiles such as hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen-fueled vehicles, fully automated or driverless cars, environmental damage caused by greenhouse gases, the low standard of fuels sold in the Philippines, the effects of bioethanol, the Car of the Year and Car Awards Group Inc. (CAGI, of which I was once the president) and developments in the Philippine automotive industry, including the failure so far of the Aquino administration to come up with a roadmap for the industry approved by Congress, also supplied column material.

 

Over the years, I have met many nice and sincere personalities in the auto industry.  The good ones greatly outnumber the questionable ones, just as my positive-outlook columns outnumber the negative ones.  That, in a nutshell, sums up my 27 years in the Motoring section.  Maybe it’s time to shift gears and write a book instead?