In order to show that the government doesn’t exist simply to milk its citizens of money, it takes every opportunity to show the world that it is putting our taxes to good use. The latest example is the Philippine National Police’s recent acquisition of 240 brand-new vehicles, supposedly worth a total of P818,175,766.
Now, photos circulating on social media only show a Toyota Hilux-based patrol vehicles. If one would divide the price by the number of units, each vehicle would have a price tag of some P3,409,066. This is extremely odd, considering a Hilux with all the bells and whistles and a special paint job would come to P2,005,000.
We did a little digging and came across this Philippine News Agency report which provided the breakdown of the newly acquired fleet. It consists of 10 utility trucks, 13 shuttle buses, 90 four-wheel-drive troop carriers, and 127 patrol vehicles. The last two are built upon two variants of the Hilux: 4×4 G AT for the troop transports, and the single-cab 4×2 J for the patrol trucks.
There is no mention of which companies supplied the utility trucks and the shuttle buses, but we wanted to find out 240 vehicles would really amount to over P800 million. We looked up the prices of all the individual vehicle types and did some arithmetic on what it would actually cost. We searched online and even used an archived version of Toyota Motor Philippines’ website just to check the SRP of the Hilux 4×4 G (because the variant is no longer sold). Check this out:
So, not good. However, Toyota sent us a press release stating that it dispatched an initial 127 units of the 411 patrol trucks that were supposedly ordered by the police. So, we did our calculations again and came up with these numbers:
Much better. And we can only hope that the P114 million difference was used by high-ranking officials to buy sports cars with for modifications to make the vehicles suitable for police work.
And since this is where our taxes went, we expect the PNP to take good care of these assets and really use them for personal transport to serve and protect the public.
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