Long before BYD and Tesla became household names in Malaysia, the only electric cars on our roads wore badges like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. The traditional, legacy automakers were here first. They built the country’s EV market almost single-handedly.
And then, in the space of about three years, they were comprehensively overtaken in the very transition they had started. JPJ registration data tells the story in stark terms.
Go back to 2021, before the government’s EV incentives kicked in, and battery-electric vehicles were a rounding error: just 257 registered in the whole year.
But of those, 94.9% came from established legacy brands. If you drove an EV in Malaysia back then, it was almost certainly a premium European one. When the CBU import-duty exemption arrived in 2022 and the market began to stir, the legacy brands still held 76.7% of it.
Just how premium and how niche that pre-incentive market was is best captured by a single model: the Porsche Taycan. Of the 579 EVs registered in Malaysia up to the end of 2021, 184 of them, or nearly a third, were Taycans.
A six-figure electric sports saloon starting north of RM500,000 was, remarkably, the country’s best-selling EV. In other words, before the incentives arrived, an electric car was less a practical purchase than a wealthy enthusiast’s novelty, and nothing illustrates that better than a Porsche topping the chart.
From there, the floor gave way. Their share fell to 42.8% in 2023 as the first Chinese brands arrived, then to 18.0% in 2024, 9.1% in 2025, and just 3.6% in the first five months of 2026.
The remarkable part is that the legacy automakers did not actually collapse in volume. They registered around 4,000 EVs a year through 2023 to 2025, broadly flat. They simply stood still while the market exploded around them, growing from 3,129 units in 2022 to 44,813 in 2025.
Two moments did the damage. The first was Tesla’s arrival in force. In 2024, its first full year of local deliveries, Tesla alone registered 5,137 EVs, more than every legacy brand in the country combined (3,930).
The second, and bigger, was the Chinese wave. By 2025 Chinese marques held more than half the EV market, and in 2026 they have been joined by Proton, whose e.MAS range has made the national brand the single biggest EV seller in the country. Between the American disruptor, the Chinese newcomers and the resurgent national champion, there was plenty of competition for the legacy players.
Dig into who the “legacy” players actually are, and a second, sharper story emerges: this was almost entirely a German effort. The German bloc, led by BMW with Mercedes-Benz, MINI, Porsche and others have registered 15,565 EVs to date.
The Japanese giants, the brands that dominate Malaysia’s overall market, have put just 741 EVs on the road between Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Lexus combined. Toyota sold more than 129,000 vehicles in 2025 alone, but only 73 of them, all-time, have been electric.
The Japanese chose to bet on hybrids and have done well in that area. Almost every segment of car from Honda and Toyota are available as a hybrid now, and users are able to choose to save on fuel with a car from a brand familiar to them without having to readjust their lifestyle to EV ownership.
BMW has been by far the most committed legacy brand, accounting for more than half of all legacy EV registrations with 8,309 units. But even BMW peaked back in 2023, with 3,237 registrations. If the best-resourced legacy effort in the country has gone backwards, it underlines just how hard this transition has been for the old guard.
And it wasn’t that BMW didn’t put a great effort. If you remember, back in 2021 we mentioned how the BMW iX’s Malaysian launch price was a bargain compared to how it was priced overseas. At that time we highlighted how the Langkawi duty-free price (pre-incentives, so the launch price had tax) was much lower than the overseas prices, and we made the conclusion BMW Malaysia was likely working on small margins.
None of this means the legacy brands are finished. They remain dominant in the petrol and hybrid segments that still make up the vast majority of the market, and a premium EV is a different proposition to a mass-market one.
Do you think the legacy brands can claw back EV share, or has that ship sailed? Let us know in the comments.
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