Classics: Letter from Mexico City by Mike Davis (2/28/2005)
It's not just more of the same, as far as cars are concerned.

More articles by Mike Davis

In Latin America, it would be hard to find a greater contrast than betweenMexico, which lies along the southern border of the United States, and Honduras, which is mid-way down the Central American connection between the North and South Americas.

Honduras is the third poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere - after Haiti and Bolivia - and it shows in the population of older and smaller vehicles one sees on its streets and highways. U.S. and European makes are few and far between. Where Ford touring cars might once have prevailed, today it is the diesel-powered Japanese-brand crew-cab pickup, predominantly Toyota and Nissan.

Even the police vehicles are crew-cab pickups, camouflage-painted like the police uniforms in black-and-gray jungle patterns.

When was the last time you saw a vehicle nameplated Datsun? The name was phased out by the Japanese company in the early 1980s in favor of Nissan. But come to Honduras, especially mountainous, irregularly laid out Tegucigalpa , and you'll see aging subcompact Datsun station wagons functioning as the capital city's taxicabs.

New and old in "Tegu"

As a dirt-poor country, Honduras not unsurprisingly is a VERY small new vehicle market with 9335 deliveries reported by distributors in 2004. To put that in perspective, remember that the U.S. market was nearly 17 million last year while the Mexican market was 1.1 million. Even tiny Denmark saw more sales of vehicles last month - January 2005 - than were sold in Honduras during all of last year.

Still, my windshield survey in "Tegu," as the locals call it, managed to spot a number of familiar faces, that is, American cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Leaving aside those clustered outside the American Embassy, which hardly counts, I noted three Chevrolet Cavaliers, four Blazers, three Ford Focuses, three old Rangers, an S-10, two Bronco IIs, a Saturn sedan, a Jeep wagon, and a battered Pinto wagon.

Among foreign nameplates, there was an aged European Ford Escort, a couple of vintage Land Rovers - the ones with front fenders extending beyond the radiator grille - a few Beetles, many Corollas, many Datsuns, Toyota HiAces and HiLuxes, and numerous generic older Japanese models which either had lost their badges due to wear and tear or never had them in the first place.

On the highway between Tegucigalpa and Comayagua to the northwest, I spotted billboards for Ford Explorer and Escape and Renault Mégane.

Curiously, the most obvious U.S. vehicle presence in Honduras seems to be old Ford and International school buses. I was told these "yellow crates,"

as we used to call them when I was in grade school, are purchased off the auction block when they have outlived their lives in service to American school districts. They are driven to Central America where, if gasoline-engined, they are re-engined with diesels, and then put into transit-bus service.

Sometimes, the names of the schools are not even painted over.

Imagine spotting a " Birmingham Seaholm High School" or "Grosse Pointe Northern" on a wandering Tegucigalpa street. I didn't see one, but was told they are not uncommon, at least in theory.

Who sells what

As noted, Japanese makes predominate in Honduras . Toyota , Nissan, Mitsubishi and Mazda together totaled 70.5 percent of 2004 new vehicle sales, which doesn't leave much for the other 16 brands in the market. Toyota is far away market leader at 27.1 percent with Nissan second at 19.0 percent.

The immediate past-president of Honduras, a newspaper publisher educated in Louis iana, also owns the largest Toyota dealership, I was told. Under the Honduran constitution, presidents may serve only one term.

The Motor City 's brand penetration is miniscule - Ford is in seventh place with 3.5 percent and Chevrolet in eighth with 3.1 percent. And the raw numbers are small, too, counting 324 Fords and 292 Chevrolets. DaimlerChrysler Group is not active in the Honduras market and Mother Mercedes made only 19 deliveries in 2004.

Passenger vehicles are in a distinct minority in Honduras with a mere 1840 cars sold last year, 19.7 percent of the market. This is hardly surprising given the mountainous character of much of the country. There is still no good first-class highway stretching from the north Caribbean coast to the south Pacific coast of the country. The Pan American Highway crosses from East to West, and that's pretty much it for major roads.

Furthermore, Honduras like much of the Third World is an economy vehicle market. Some 91 percent of the cars sold had engines of two liters or less, while three-fourths of all vehicles delivered in 2004 were diesel-powered.

Significantly, in many of the vehicle classes, American makes do not offer diesels.

Overall, the largest vehicle segment, as noted in my windshield survey, is clearly for pickup trucks - 4478 units or 48 percent of the Honduran market in 2004. And of these, 98 percent were diesel-powered and 54 percent were 4x4. Ford, the world leader in pickups with the F-150, delivered only 105 such vehicles in Honduras last year.

Crew cabs are ubiquitous in Honduras for passenger carrying. I spotted one such Toyota with eight adult passengers, including those hazardously - but all too commonly - perched in the cargo bed. On the winding highway crossing two mountain passes, we were overtaken by a battered Nissan pickup hugely overloaded with a cargo of pigs headed to market in Tegu, its worn diesel smoke trailing behind.

Summing up, the tiny vehicle market in this impoverished Central American country is very different from the First World's. In certain respects - economy vehicles in general and fuel-saving diesels in particular - the trained observer has to wonder if it might be a window into the future for all our worlds.