Flipping the EV script – Why national carmakers should pivot to commercial fleets

MALAYSIA’S electric vehicle (EV) conversation is currently trapped in a populist bottleneck.

For the past year, teh-tarik sessions and political expectations have revolved around a single, highly anticipated milestone: the arrival of sub-RM80,000 national mass-market passenger EVs.

The successful launch of Proton’s e.Mas 5 and Perodua’s homegrown sportback, the QV-E, have certainly proven that our national carmakers can localise advanced manufacturing when under immense regulatory pressure.

Sort of, but not really. Yet?

In fact, Malaysian Automotive Association (MAA) data reveals that EV registrations surged to cross nine per cent of total industry volume (TIV) in early 2026, mostly thanks to Proton’s e.Mas 5 and 7.

Yet, beneath these celebratory headlines lies an uncomfortable reality.

For the individual buyer, the practical hurdles of EV ownership – battery replacement anxieties, rapid technological obsolescence, and a highly uneven public charging infrastructure concentrated almost exclusively in urban pockets – remain stubbornly intact.

If we genuinely want to achieve the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR) target of a 15 per cent electric share by 2030, we need to stop looking at the EV transition purely through the lens of individual passenger cars.

It is time for a strategic pivot. Proton and Perodua should aggressively redirect their engineering capabilities and manufacturing scales toward a massive, unglamorous, yet highly lucrative sector: Electric light commercial vehicles (e-LCVs).

To understand why this pivot is necessary, we only need to look at the world’s leading EV ecosystems.

While global media headlines focus on cooling consumer passenger EV sales in early 2026, the electric commercial vehicle market is quietly experiencing a massive boom.

According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global EV Outlook, electric truck andcommercial vehicle sales more than doubled globally, reaching nine per cent of the total market.

Like everything else EV, the undeniable epicentre of this shift is China, where aggressive industrial policy has turned the sector into a juggernaut: nearly a third of all heavy trucks sold in China are now electric.

This is boosted further by a 27 per cent spike in domestic diesel prices following recent geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East.

This is a case where central direction and regulatory pressures find a good fit with global geopolitics to give Chinese manufacturers a massive advantage on the global scene, again.

Some may say this is by pure luck, but others would argue that luck favours the prepared.

Europe is also tracing an identical trajectory, but there is a major difference, which we will get to later.

Driven by stringent European Union fleet emission standards, the European electric commercial vehicle market is projected to skyrocket from US$4.4 billion in 2026 to nearly US$15 billion over the next decade.

Battery pack costs for European commercial EVs plummeted to €135/kWh, pushing urban battery-electric delivery fleets past the holy grail of total cost of ownership (TCO) parity with diesel.

Here is where the story starts to fork: There is a stark divergence in how China and Europe handle the upfront price differential between EV and internal combustion engine (ICE) commercial vehicles.

That the disparity is wide is obvious, but where we can learn is the lesson in industrial execution.

In Europe, the upfront price premium for an electric van remains a significant barrier, often listing at 30-50 per cent higher than its diesel equivalent.

For larger electric prime movers, the gap is even more punishing, with European models costing nearly triple the price of a standard diesel truck (around €320,000 versus €115,000).

In contrast, China is aggressively closing this gap. Chinese commercial EVs enter the market priced roughly 30 per cent lower than their European counterparts.

In fact, freight-decarbonisation data from early 2026 shows that China’s “second-generation” commercial EVs -built from the ground up on dedicated electric skateboard chassis rather than heavy, retrofitted diesel bodies – are achieving near upfront price parity with diesel in specific light-to-medium segments.

Why is the gap so massive?

The answer lies in structural integration and architecture. Europe’s legacy manufacturers are still burdened by fragmented supply chains and compliance-driven engineering that treats electrification as an expensive add-on to traditional platforms.

China, conversely, controls over 70 per cent of the global battery supply chain and has masterfully deployed battery-swapping technology and modular, dedicated EV chassis.

By unbundling the cost of the battery from the vehicle itself via Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) models, Chinese fleet operators can slash the initial purchase price of an electric truck by nearly half.

For Proton and Perodua, this is the ultimate strategic fork in the road.

If our national marques merely import foreign platforms and bolt batteries into existing ICE chassis, they will inherit Europe’s high-premium curse.

To succeed, they must adopt China’s playbook: developing a dedicated, modular electric LCV platform and exploring battery-subscription frameworks to eliminate the upfront price sting for local logistics companies.

Battery-as-a-Service makes the most sense when applied to commercial applications where burdensome capital expenditure can be converted into inevitable and constant operational expenditure.

The mass consumer market is notoriously fickle, emotional, and paralysed by a “wait-and-see” sentiment driven by global EV price volatility.

Even in mighty China, we are seeing EV sales numbers stumble even as ICE car purchases shrink at an even faster rate – all as a result of the wait-and-see attitude as the market crosses the chasm of confidence.

Fleet buyers, by contrast, are ruthlessly pragmatic. They do not care about brand prestige or 0-100 km/h sprint times; they care about spreadsheets.

A commercial delivery fleet operates on a simple, predictable matrix: the TCO, or total cost of ownership.

Even with Europe’s higher upfront premium, a 2026 commercial vehicle study shows that an electric van saves roughly €2,700 to €4,500 annually in energy and maintenance over 30,000 kilometres compared to a diesel sibling.

In China, where the upfront premium is drastically lower, the financial argument is ironclad: lifetime expenditure on an electric truck is now estimated to be half that of a diesel equivalent over one million kilometres.

It transforms green compliance from a corporate expense into an immediate cost-saving measure.

In Malaysia, we can see that prices of electric buses from Europe are double those of Chinese products.

When compared to similar ICE products, European prices are nearly triple those of diesel burners, while Chinese versions are around double the price of trucks with exhaust pipes.

The single greatest bottleneck to passenger EV adoption in Malaysia is the public charging network.

Building a sprawling nationwide grid of DC fast chargers takes years, massive capital expenditure, and intricate coordination with regional utility providers.

Commercial fleets completely bypass this infrastructure trap.

A last-mile delivery van has a highly predictable duty cycle. It runs a fixed route during daytime hours, clocks a known mileage, and returns to a central depot every evening.

When the Malaysian Public Works Department (JKR) embarked on its EV conversion project, it decided that a range of between 150km and 200km is more than enough because its vehicles travel less than 100km a day.

They go to a job site and are turned off until the job is done and they head back to the depot.

Other organisations also have hard data about their fleet movements, and they are, for the most part, very predictable.

Globally, this exact operational reality means that roughly 68 per cent of all electric commercial vehicle charging is handled via private depot AC charging rather than public en-route networks.

By charging overnight during off-peak grid hours, these commercial vehicles eliminate any reliance on public infrastructure, effectively erasing “range anxiety” from the operational equation.

However, there is a broader macroeconomic argument for this pivot, and we need to be careful how we unpack this move.

Industrial experts have recently warned that Malaysia risks becoming a mere “packing plant” for fully imported or low-value completely knocked-down (CKD) kits if we do not develop genuine, domestic technical capabilities.

If Proton and Perodua chase volume solely in the hyper-competitive passenger car market, they are forced to compete with highly vertically integrated foreign giants.

This leaves little margin to cultivate the local vendor ecosystem.

The e-LCV segment can be a protective incubator because commercial vehicles prioritise durability, modularity and utilitarian design over complex aesthetic styling or cutting-edge software suites.

This simpler architectural baseline is far more accessible for Malaysia’s Tier 1 and Tier 2 stamping, casting, and mechanical components suppliers to localise.

By capturing the fleet market first, the national marques can build genuine manufacturing economies of scale, mature the domestic component supply chains and upskill local engineers in high-voltage systems.

True automotive sovereignty is not built on the dashboards of trendy hatchbacks; it is forged in the supply chains of the vehicles that keep our economy moving.

Letting the private consumer market mature naturally while focusing the state’s industrial machinery on commercial electrification is not a step backward – it is strategic pragmatism.

By dominating the e-LCV space, Proton and Perodua can establish a reliable, high-volume production baseline that secures local jobs and builds real industrial depth.

The lessons learned, the supply chain efficiencies gained, and the localised technology developed in the commercial sector can then be seamlessly transferred to create genuinely viable, worry-free mass-market passenger EVs in the future.

It is time to take our national EV ambitions out of the showroom and put them to work on our roads.

© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd

المصدر: New Straits Times