Anwar: Government Committed To Grow EV Space - Yet EVCB Approval Still Slow!

During the launch of the Weststar Maxus MIFA 9 Electric MPV recently, Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim called upon all automotive brands to embrace the government's commitment to accelerating the growth of the electric vehicle (EV) industry in our country.

This aligns with the government's goals outlined in the 2024 Budget, which aims to expedite the adoption of EVs and promote the use of green technology across various sectors. EVs also hold promise in addressing climate change, as the automotive industry contributes approximately one-fifth of global emissions.

The government has established a robust and clear policy for the EV industry, including extending import duty exemptions for locally assembled EV components until December 2027, granting full excise and sales tax exemptions for locally assembled vehicles (CKD), and continuing import duty exemptions for fully imported vehicles (CBU) until December 2025.

Furthermore, the government would offer tax incentives of up to RM300,000 for companies leasing non-commercial electric vehicles and exempt road tax for all EVs until 31st December, 2025.

Nevertheless, we at CariCarz have noted that several things have not changed on the ground despite Anwar's best efforts and policy statements, particularly in regards to the seriousness of EV charger deployment towards the PM's 10,000 public chargers by 2025 ambition.

For example, the Tesla destination chargers that were set up at Sunway Putra Mall in late September are still not operational over a month and a half later. The mall's response when our buddies at MYEVOC messaged them on its X account was simply that they were still awaiting approval from the Energy Commission (ST).

Isn’t the folks at ST supposed to have a monthly sit down to fly through these pending approvals? Furthermore with currently only 1434 charge points/EVCB (latest figure, of which we have debunked that there is discrepancy in the numbers declared) available as shown on MEVnet we would push for these approvals to actually be done on a weekly basis bare minimum not monthly.

Why weekly? Well 2025 is actually just 13 months away and we are still down by 8,566 EVCB (electric vehicle charging bay) which equates to 659 EVCB that would need to go up on a monthly basis. Now let's say we push the target to end 2025, meaning we have 25 months in hand, it would still mean about 342 EVCB up and running on a monthly basis.

How are we to run through these numbers based on just a monthly ST seating for approval when even with the current low number of EVCB being rolled-out getting timely approval seems to be impossible. Is this perhaps a result of too much red-tape in place or is it simply due to the lack of participation from the top-guns at this stage resulting in the rest fearing to make a timely judgement call on approvals?