RIYADH: Saudi King Abdullah unveiled his country’s first domestically manufactured car on Monday.
The all-terrain "Ghazal 1" was designed over two years by student engineers at the King Saud University in Riyadh in cooperation with a number of companies, including Mercedes, Motorola and Magna Canada . Engineers designed the 15.7 by 6.2 foot vehicle to match Saudi Arabia ‘s harsh desert environment. They named it after a speedy desert deer.
"This car is designed for use on all roads and terrain, even in difficult conditions, while the car interior is designed to provide comfort for passengers," Dr Saied Mohamed Hassan Darwish of the university’s industrial engineering department told reporters, adding that the kingdom has plans to manufacture 20,000 of the vehicles each year.
“What is achieved today is a clear proof of the ability of Saudi youth to make innovations and inventions," Higher Education Minister Khaled Al-Anqari told reporters.
“It also shows that we have capable people who can transform ideas into products of high economic value,” added the university’s president Abdullah Al-Othman.
Saudi analysts were largely caught off guard by the announcement, which was met with significant scepticism.
"We just heard about this all of a sudden so we don’t know a lot about the car and we are not sure if it’s going in the right direction," Ali Abdul-Rahman Al-Mazyad, a Saudi economic columnist told The Media Line. "We are not sure who actually made it and exactly where it was manufactured."
"Even if this car was made in Saudi, is it useful for our economy or just old fashioned industry?" he said. "All we know is that something is at work between the university and the government. The head of the university is a very active man, so perhaps he’s looking for personal promotion."
Eli Abi Haybar, one of the founders of Street Kings Arabia, a Saudi car aficionado group, agreed that there was little economic need for Saudi-manufactured vehicles.
"Maybe they are just trying to do something new, because it’s not about price," he told The Media Line. "Saudi cars are not so expensive because there are no taxes on car sales in Saudi, so if for example I want to buy a Toyota in Lebanon it’s about $20,000 brand new. Here it’s $12,000 and we have plenty of cheap Chinese, Japanese and French cars."
One of the Middle East’s largest car markets, automobile sales make up about three percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product.
Following overstated fears that the global recession might seriously weaken the Arab world’s largest economy, Saudi car sales are now expected to boom. The kingdom’s car market, including both commercial automobiles and transport infrastructure, is currently worth about $9 billion. The market is expected to grow by 30 percent in 2010.
Over 675,000 cars are expected to be sold in 2010 to a population of just under 25 million.
A Saudi car analyst and businessman, speaking on the condition of anonymity, argued the kingdom does not yet have the capacity to develop a domestic car manufacturing industry.
"I don’t know why they were keeping it a secret but it was a surprise to me as well," he told The Media Line. "King Saud University is one of the country’s premier universities so it makes sense that it would be designed there, but I didn’t even know they were developing it,"
"Between you and me I think this is more of a prestige type project to show that we have the capability to do this rather than the promise of a serious domestically designed and built car industry developing here," the businessman continued. " Saudi Arabia is the largest car market in the Gulf, so maybe one of the big car companies will decide to assemble passenger cars here but a locally designed and built industry – I really don’t see it."
Saudi Arabia has become infamous in the Arab world in general, and in the Gulf in particular, for the local appetite for expensive cars. Spottings of young Saudis cruising the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh in Maseratis, Ferraris, Prosches and Harley Davidson motorbikes are increasingly commonplace.
Over the past two decades Saudi Arabia has recorded 4 million traffic accidents, leading to 86,000 deaths and 611,000 injuries, 7 percent of which resulted in permanent disabilities.
A recent study at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), a Riyadh-based scientific research group, warned that if the current rise in road accident rates is not curbed, Saudi Arabia will have over 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030. Little is know about the new car, particularly about its safety features.
