The governments of Malaysia and the USA have reached an agreement on an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, as announced today in a joint statement.
You can read the full joint statement here. Naturally as an automotive content site, we immediately scanned through the contents of the statement for anything related to passenger cars. After all, one can dream of seeing American muscle cars roaming our roads with tax-free pricing?
There are two points for now. Firstly, Malaysia has committed to provide significant preferential market access for US goods including passenger vehicles. There are no details on what significant preferential market access is for now.
At the moment, the only CBU cars imported into Malaysia from the US are a bunch of BMW and Mercedes-Benz SUVs such as the BMW X6, Mercedes-Benz GLS, EQE SUV, EQS SUV, AMG GLE, and others. Tesla cars for the Malaysian market are imported from China, not the USA.
The next point is Malaysia has committed to accepting U.S. manufactured vehicles built to U.S. motor vehicle safety and emissions standards.
To our knowledge, Malaysia currently uses the European-centric UN ECE standards for homologation. Perhaps this means SAE/DOT standards will be accepted too after this.
This is an interesting point because if US standards are automatically approved, could this open the doors for Tesla to offer the Tesla Cybertruck here in Malaysia? Or would it be easier for Full Self Driving subscription to be offered, since it already passes US regulations? FSD is already available in right hand drive form for HW4 cars in Australia and New Zealand.
No details yet, and this will be ironed out over the next few weeks, but it’s certainly an interesting potential development to watch out for.
The post Malaysia and USA reach Agreement on Reciprocal Trade – US passenger cars for Malaysian market? appeared first on Paul Tan's Automotive News.
