CHINA has aspirations of global economic domination and automobiles is one sector where it is making some serious headway. There will be major implications to the sector in Malaysia. While the West has imposed significant tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) coming out of China, Malaysia’s only restriction is that the cars are priced above RM100,000.
This is probably to afford local manufacturers, such as Proton and Perodua, some time to catch up with the China EV players. You can almost feel the onslaught of the Chinese marques coming to town. This week, the J7 by Jaecoo, albeit an internal combustion engine (ICE) car, was launched.
It is a Range Rover lookalike at a fraction of the cost. Anecdotally, in my neighbourhood in an older part of Petaling Jaya, there is already a BYD sales outlet and two more China companies are setting up theirs — Great Wall Motors (GWM) and Jaecoo. Jaecoo’s next models coming into Malaysia will be EVs.
Jaecoo is the luxury brand of Chery from China, the latter of which already has a large presence in Malaysia. It is well known how China has secured pole position in car manufacturing globally despite not having a long history in the sector. One of the main reasons is that it didn’t have a legacy industry and so leapfrogged into the EV segment, hiring top car engineers and designers from the world, along the way.
Of course a lot of credit needs to go into the research and development that has gone on in China. There is also the theory that t.