Hybrid car tax exemption to be extended to end of 2011

In today’s Budget 2011 announcement, the PM has announced that import duty and excise duty is now FULLY exempted for hybrid and electric cars and motorcycles until the end of the year 2011.

• The duty exemption has been extended until the 31st of December 2011, it was supposed to expire by the end of this year.
• The duties for hybrid cars are even lower now. Previously the government offered 100% import duty exemption and 50% excise duty exemption, now it’s 100% exemption for both import duty and excise duty! This should mean the price of the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid should be even lower now.
• Exemptions have now been extended to electric cars, hybrid motorcycles as well as electric motorcycles.
• The rest of the details are status quo, for example the exemptions still only apply to internal combustion engines with capacities of lower than 2.0 litres, so there’s still no way for the Toyota Camry Hybrid to be brought in with these tax benefits.

Let’s look at how much that additional reduction in excise duty means for hybrid cars. This is just a possible guesstimate, feel free to correct us in the comments. We are calculating the new Peninsular Malaysia price based on the Langkawi pricing (which gives us an indication of how much a truly tax free price would be, including whatever profit margin the local distributor wants to take) with an additional 10% added for sales tax. All prices are for private registration.

The budget text appendix also says that the new duty range is for applications beginning from January 2011 to the end of 2011 so we’re probably only going to see any drop in prices next year.