Published on August 26th, 2022 | by Sounder Rajen

Australian Bank No Longer Offering Loans For ICE Vehicles From 2025

While banks in Australia can do this successfully can Malaysian banks do this as well?

As Electric Vehicles (EVs) become increasingly common around the world, many countries are adapting quickly to this new change. As such, many countries and their banks are incentivising these EVs in various ways as the whole world is setting goals for themselves to be carbon neutral or net zero soon.

While Malaysia is definitely on track to do the same, we are nowhere near the same level of EV adoption as Australia, which raises the question, since Bank Australia can successfully stop providing loans for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles starting 2025, can Malaysia do the same successfully?

Well we could, but not yet. Since Australia is far ahead of Malaysia in terms of EV adoption and infrastructure, it is a very feasible goal to stop offering bank loans for ICE vehicles as there are an abundance of options at a myriad of different price points, so there is still going to be an EV for any budget.

Now in Malaysia, this is simply not the case, not only is EV infrastructure lacking, but most EVs are expensive. Of course there are some that are not ridiculously priced but for the majority of Malaysians, they are just out of our budgets, there is a reason cars like the Perodua Myvi and Proton Persona are so popular.

Note the two cars I used as an example earlier are from our National car brands, Proton and Perodua, notice how neither of these brands offer an EV in their lineup? This is partially also because there is no high demand for EVs in Malaysia at the moment, mainly due to how imported cars are taxed here but that is still a contributing factor.

Moves like this in Australia are because a high percentage of emissions in Australia comes from passenger vehicles and while this is also true for Malaysia, we do not have the infrastructure or fairly priced EVs (Below RM99k) to compete, but perhaps we will soon as many companies are already taking initiatives to improve on this.

The bottom line is, while this is a good initiative in Australia, it is not a good move here in Malaysia, at least for the moment but given enough time and development, Malaysia may see our banks doing this sooner rather than later and as an old school car enthusiast, I am just not ready to say goodbye to ICE vehicles yet.