What does Family Man dream of driving?  (Cue Sting.)  After having a wife, house, and 2.8 kids, what will he judge as the ideal vehicle for a million pesos or less?  Would you believe a 9-seater van called the Hyundai Starex?  Mind you, this is not to fulfill his fantasies of driving an F1 car, but to indulge the rest of the family, including, wife, kids and nannies.         

The Korean carmakers have been trying to crack the local car market for several years now, introducing everything from oddball minicars like the Hyundai Atoz to ubiquitous 1.6 liter sedans to luxury barges like the Daewoo Prince Super Salon.  (No, you can’t get your hair done inside.)  From all these attempts, their biggest success to date has been the Starex.   Hyundai has apparently found just the right combination of style, comfort and practicality that has appealed to a lot of Philippine families.  We don’t have an exact figure as to how many of these people-carriers are sold, but just about everywhere you go, particularly malls or schools, you’ll find Starex in a multitude of colors, from the most sedate grays to the loudest shades of yellow.

It’s hard to determine how just how many Starex have been sold, because for the most part these vans have been sold not exclusively through an official dealer network, but largely by unofficial import shops—the ones you’ll spot on many main roads like EDSA, Katipunan or Quezon Avenue.  We suspect that this abundant supply is one of the reasons why the price of the Starex has been kept below the one million peso mark.    (Hmm…I wonder if this strategy can help alleviate the current shortage and high price of RAV4s).

NEXT PAGE >>>