El Blog de Daniel Nantón

Costa Rica is now struggling to adjust to the amount of traffic we deal with in a daily basis. Unfortunately all problems come together, such as the need to expand roads, with the impossibility of doing it because of the lack of land in the proximity of the road. This has been solved once more in a very Costa Rican fashion, or to be compared with the McGyver style. Some of the most important roads are now suffering a metamorphosis from a 2 lane demarcation, to a 3 lane. Although this is a solution, it is more like a patch and all drivers need to be specially careful when approaching a bridge, which have not been enlarged. All this is practically normal when you live in Costa Rica more than a couple of years, but it still somehow is interesting to denote the way we deal with problems. For one thing, we are extremely used to react against the problem, showing that the proactive has not formed part of our culture. We costarricans are also very accepting, we don't challenge wh...

Since the cars are now being outsourced starting with the BMW X3, we can think of the old “quality and brand image” to have gone away. After all, the difference in the make of a car is basically the engineering, and the materials but if all these is now shared by the same company through different brands, then maybe we are looking at brands with the wrong eyes. BMW is outsourcing development and production to Magna Steyr, which is at the same time handling other assembly lines. The experience is of course pouring into the company, and so is the ability to innovate and bring costs down. So why are we still buying cars according to a brand, aren’t they all the same? Doesn’t this assure us a premium quality across all brands? Maybe the market will change, when customers realize that the brand is not enough reason to sustain the major difference in the price tag, after all, are you really paying that much more to have a different insignia in the hood.