Investment Opportunity

You want to invest in a growth industry? Consider putting your money into vehicle mirror replacement in Myanmar!

Wider and wider trucks and cars here try to squeeze past each other on roads built for bicycles, more than a century ago. Plus, for long-story reasons,* the vast majority of these vehicles have wrong-side steering wheels. Drivers are trying to guess how much room they have to pass without really being able to see around the car in front of them. Left turns are accidents waiting to happen. Mirrors get snapped off all the time.

In fairness, things could be worse. Not so many years back in Myanmar, most cars had much bigger problems than their mirrors or their steering wheels. Like, say, holes in the floor big enough to see the road through. Or non-existent exhaust systems. By government decree, an entire generation of cars was completely replaced, and at the same time import restrictions were loosened. Now, Myanmar has more and wider cars, most of them gently used models brought in from Japan or Singapore, where traffic travels on the left.

Many of the buses on this country’s roads likewise come from those two countries. To avoid passengers stepping into traffic, new doors are cut into the right side. Interior signs, however, remain written in languages few people here can read. (Some buses still look like they are driving the streets of Japan, sporting announcements that implore passengers to "Preserve the Nature of Mt. Fuji.")

*When cars first came to Burma, drivers used the left-hand side of the road. One night in 1970, apparently on the advice of a fortune teller, the lead general ordered the move to the right, effective immediately.