What does the future bring? ICE vehicle demand to decline in two years’ time?
There was a recent report by Bernama where Proton’s CEO Roslan Abdullah said that they are looking into deploying their electric vehicle by 2025, two years earlier than projected.
Their plan, which will starts off with vehicles with mild hybrid (MHEV) tech, followed by BEVs and PHEVs, seems to be on course, especially if they debut the smart#1 BEV later on this year, after the recent launch of the Proton X90, which is of course an MHEV vehicle.
Proton is not the only local automotive manufacturer working hard on moving things into the future because Perodua too are pushing hard to bring new energy vehicles (NEV) to the masses.
This was prevalent recently thanks to Perodua’s Electric Motion Online (EMO) concept, which debuted at the recent 2023 Malaysia Autoshow.
The EMO concept vehicle is probably Perodua’s first show of hands for its BEV plans. However, its CEO Datuk Zainal Abidin Ahmad reminded everyone that the main target is to achieve “better carbon neutrality”.
Whether that’ll be in the form of more efficient ICE vehicles, a new hybrid or an electric vehicle, Perodua’s CEO just wants to make sure that they work towards carbon neutrality in line with the government and national automotive policy requirements.
Underneath this mission statement is of course Perodua’s study to where they expect sales of ICE vehicles to drop after 2024, and since they expect hybrid vehicles to fill in the gap till 2030, where then BEV vehicles are the only vehicles mainly in demand, these are the parameters that they have to work on.
Perhaps Proton’s findings from their studies are different since they will be selling BEVs starting this year, but it has been said that they will eventually consider BEVs as their core products in the future.
Two different paths for two national auto manufacturers make for one exciting future. Imagine if Hydrogen tech picks up? What will both of them do then?
