There were roughly 28 million households in Pakistan, based on an estimated population of 170 million, in 2004. As such, only 6% of the households in Pakistan had a motor vehicle in 2004. There were still 26.29 million households without a motor vehicle.
According to the contents of your editorial, the automobile industry plans to increase the existing production capacity of 168,000 to 503,000 units per annum over the next 7 years. By that time, our country's population should be around 200 million. That means, the estimated households wilt be 33 million.
Assuming that 10% of the households would be able to buy an automobile, we would need 5,00,000 motor vehicles for the new 5 million households. What about the replacement of the existing 1.71 million motor vehicles?
The demand for motor vehicles is most likely to register a faster growth over the coming years if the financial institutions continue to extend leasing facility for buying motor vehicles at the current pace. We can, therefore, safely assume that at least 10% instead of 6% of the households would be able to purchase an automobile.
It becomes obvious from the figures quoted above that the existing automobile assemblers just cannot cope with the future demand. The genuine auto buyers will continue to suffer in the future, too if the government does not allow the free import of motor vehicles to meet the domestic demand, increase employment opportunities, add revenue to the national exchequer and give relief to the consumers. At the same time, the automakers whose auto brands are allowed to be imported into the-country would be tempted or could be persuaded to go for local assembly under a phased programme.