The small Ari deposes SUV

Stratosphere they would all say is a misnomer. To a great extent it is but as far as misnomers go it has proved to be an inspired one.

The idea of a small car that looks like a four wheel drive SUV should only belong in the startup lunatic asylum.

Grugan Hoyde Melsing has always been told that. But Hoyde was not intent on proving them wrong. He was only intent on proving himself right.

He called his first prototype Ari because he wanted to create a brand of his own that would conjure either an image of a SUV or a small car.

“What’s in between has to be in between,” he says and between sips of bubble tea that he is addicted to, he says that the idea was corny but “so were electric lightbulbs and airplanes and personal computers before people saw what good they could be put to.”

The Ari is pure design. It doesn’t only look like a SUV but affords a great deal of the SUVs functionality and how that was achieved was upto his engineers.

But no engineer, says Hoyde, works without an idea and ideas men are scarce.

“You mean it was your idea and the engineers merely made it possible?” Hoyde is asked, and he says “it’s like making the Mona Lisa look like the Taj Mahal and try that for an engineering feat.”

He says the minaturisation of an SUV is not a facetious idea. “What’s big in an SUV took everything away from its utility.

The trick is to fit the power of an SUV into a physically small vehicle.”

Hoyde is reminded that the critics say Stratosphere never did it and that his company is selling a mere idea or an illusion. Hoyde says the sales figures speak for themselves. But he may be undermining his own argument when he adds that “if the users perceive a small car as an SUV it’s all that matters and how much power a car has and other details become irrelevant.”

Hoyde says the smallish handphone devices were never thought of as computers at the begenning but when users got used to their functionality in terms of navigation, etc etc they ditched the laptops right away except for those who needed the laptops for laborious tasks such as writing reports.

Same way, he says, small and powerful is always convenient and it’s not a joke as the critics try to make it out to be but a fact.