Perodua’s EV could be priced around RM80k, but with battery leasing – solves RV, batt degradation concerns

What’s the biggest cost in an electric vehicle? What do buyers fear going wrong the most? I bet your answer to both is ‘battery’. So, would it be better if your EV’s battery doesn’t belong to you and you bear no responsibility for it? That’s the model Perodua is looking into for its first production EV, which is due in Q4 this year.

According to Perodua president and CEO Datuk Seri Zainal Abidin Ahmad, the company’s EV could be priced around RM80,000 without the battery, which means that P2 will be the first to introduce battery leasing in Malaysia. It’s the best way to sell the car at that price, he said at a media gathering in KL last week, reported by Harian Metro.

“The battery will be leased to buyers. The ‘rental’ fee is the minimum, and based on surveys by Perodua, many are in favour of this method,” he said, adding that the EV battery leasing scheme lowers the cost of the car and ensures that owners will always have a battery in the best condition.

Another major concern that the general public has about EVs – and P2 prospects surely aren’t the type that ‘can afford’ or are willing to lose a big chunk of the car’s purchase price – is resale value. It’s plain to see that depreciation for EVs are way beyond the level we’ve seen with ICE cars – the risk of a degraded battery that will be very costly to replace is factored in the poor RV. Battery leasing erases this issue.

Zainal also said that with battery leasing, the responsibility of recycling the battery at the end of its life is with the car manufacturer. It’s not talked about often, but battery recycling is an important aspect of selling EVs and it’s something that Perodua wanted to study from the Ativa Hybrid subscription project that was launched in 2022. In Malaysia, only BMW has publicised battery recycling plans.

“For this EV project, Perodua is using self-developed technology with the help of local and foreign vendors,” Zainal said. It was previously revealed that Perodua’s EV battery will be sourced from CATL, one of the top makers of EV batteries in the world.

Why is Perodua coming up with an EV and what’s the progress? Here’s a brief recap. A publicly announced deadline by the government has forced the market leader to come up with an EV from scratch. That’s because unlike Proton, P2’s foreign partner Daihatsu does not have a suitable donor car, and the R&D team in Rawang have been on an EV crash course. The process is still ongoing, but as we saw with the eMO-II Concept from KLIMS 2024, much progress has been made.

Expect an LFP battery from CATL, which will provide around 400 km of range. At KLIMS 2024, a price range of RM50k to RM90k was mentioned, and Perodua believes that its EV will be the cheapest in the market, even after the current RM100k minimum price for CBU imported EVs is lifted.

The images you see above are Theophilus Chin’s take on the production eMO-II. Basically, he stripped off the obvious showboating of the KLIMS showcar, replacing them with realistic cues. P2 says that the eMO-II has all of the essence of the company’s first EV and the production car will have a variance of just a few percent. We’ll see in Q4.

Meanwhile, what do you think of Perodua’s battery leasing idea? Based on the points above, would it erase most EV-specific concerns if the total cost is reasonable?

GALLERY: Perodua eMO-II Concept at KLIMS 2024

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