- published: 21 Jul 2015
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Proton is a Malaysian automobile manufacturer headquartered in Subang Jaya and Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia, with a manufacturing plant in Tanjung Malim, Perak. Founded in 1983, it was Malaysia's only carmaker until the establishment of the secondary national carmaker, Perodua, in 1993. Its name is a Malay acronym for Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional (English: National Automobile Enterprise).
It is a core member of Proton Holdings Berhad, the holding company which is listed on Bursa Malaysia. A Majority of its equity is owned by Malaysian conglomerate DRB-HICOM, which bought a 42.74% stake in Proton Holdings for 1.291 billion ringgit ($413.1 million) from Khazanah Nasional in January 2012.
For more than two decades since its establishment, this stake was jointly owned by Mitsubishi Motors and parent Mitsubishi Corp. which each held a 7.93% stake in Proton until they sold it in March 2004. Mitsubishi disposed of its entire 15.86% stake in Proton, most of which were picked up by Khazanah Nasional, which previously owned 42.7% of Proton shares. The Mitsubishi-Proton partnership had come to an end due to a lack of technology transfer.
The proton is a subatomic particle with the symbol p or p+
and a positive electric charge of 1 elementary charge. One or more protons are present in the nucleus of each atom, along with neutrons. The number of protons in each atom is its atomic number. The name proton was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920, because in previous years he had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen, and was thus a candidate to be a fundamental particle and building block of all complex atomic nuclei.
In the standard model of particle physics, the proton is a hadron, composed of quarks. Prior to that model becoming a consensus in the physics community, the proton was considered a fundamental particle. A proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, with the rest mass of the quarks thought to contribute only about 1% of the proton's mass. The remainder of the proton mass is due to the kinetic energy of the quarks and to the energy of the gluon fields that bind them together.
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.
The term motorcar has also been used in the context of electrified rail systems to denote a car which functions as a small locomotive but also provides space for passengers and baggage. These locomotive cars were often used on suburban routes by both interurban and intercity railroad systems.
There are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide (roughly one car per eleven people). Around the world, there were about 806 million cars and light trucks on the road in 2007; the engines of these burn over a billion cubic meters (260 billion US gallons) of petrol/gasoline and diesel fuel yearly. The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China and India.