Over the weekend, taking advantage of the public holiday and steeling myself against the sight of petrol prices, I drove north from Kuala Lumpur to Perak — just to lay eyes on the BYD plant site in Tanjung Malim, even though it remains nothing but a field of bare earth.

Tanjung Malim and Thailand’s Rayong Province are two locations that could have grown and prospered side by side. In Rayong, BYD’s vast Southeast Asian flagship factory runs around the clock — its annual output of 150,000 vehicles has propelled Thailand to the throne of Asia’s electric vehicle Detroit.

Meanwhile, the plains of Tanjung Malim, once heralded as the future Automotive High-Tech Valley (AHTV), have ground to a complete standstill, leaving behind nothing but political posturing, bureaucratic arrogance, and the echo of empty promises drifting over the dirt.

You may already know that BYD’s completely-knocked-down (CKD) assembly plan in Tanjung Malim has fallen through.

 What you may not know is that this was no ordinary breakdown in cross-border commercial negotiations. It was the most catastrophic strategic miscalculation a nation can make at this pivotal moment of global green economic transformation — and what was lost goes far beyond billions in foreign investment.

It was a bloody, self-inflicted wound: a collision between federal protectionism and a state government’s desperate anxiety to transform its own economy.

Let us examine the contract terms the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry laid before BYD — terms that wore the mask of “protection” while functioning as a politely worded eviction notice.

The ministry stipulated that 80% of EVs locally assembled by BYD must be exported, with only 20% permitted for domestic sale; a floor price of RM100,000 was imposed; and 40% of components were required to be locally sourced.

The intent behind this combination of conditions was transparent: raise the bar for foreign investors, neutralise BYD’s most lethal competitive weapon — its extraordinary value proposition — and erect a market firewall around the national car industry.

What breathtaking short-sightedness and arrogance.

We must confront a brutal reality: in the global EV race, BYD is a deep-sea leviathan — it holds the patents for Blade Battery technology and possesses the full-stack capability to systematically dismantle any competitor in the value chain.

If BYD’s primary objective were export-focused production, it could simply expand its operations in Thailand, where the policy environment is enormously welcoming.

Why would it come to Malaysia to endure bureaucratic condescension and wade through a labyrinth of red tape?

Our officials believe that by keeping a powerful rival locked outside the gates, the national car industry can grow in peace within its greenhouse. But you cannot grow towering trees in a greenhouse. You only raise a pampered giant — one that will crumble the moment it meets a real storm.

Without the brutal stimulus of the catfish effect, Malaysia’s automotive industry is condemned to miss out entirely on this wave of technological reinvention — one that is already reshaping the sector beyond recognition.

What makes this affair most revealing is the public rupture between the Perak state government and the federal government — a rupture that has exposed the deepest structural fault line in Malaysia’s political economy: a complete misalignment of governing priorities.

For the Perak state government, this was a fight for economic survival. Perak spans over 21,000 square kilometres with a population of 2.5 million, but economic stagnation and brain drain are its open wounds — young people flow south along the North-South Expressway toward the Klang Valley, and across the Causeway toward Singapore.

Tanjung Malim’s Automotive High-Tech Valley represented Perak’s chance to reverse its fortunes and create high-income employment. The state’s KPI was simple enough: local prosperity, foreign investment secured.

But for the federal government, Tanjung Malim is not merely the site of the AHTV — it is Proton’s heartland. Allowing BYD to establish a major assembly base in Proton’s own backyard would be tantamount to inviting the wolf into the house, driving a spear straight through the fragile defensive lines Proton is still struggling to hold.

And so the federal government pulled the rug. The state set the table; the federal government flipped it. When BYD, won over by the state government’s sincerity, arrived in Perak with its bags packed and its investment ready, it found itself blocked cold by federal protectionism. The fury of Perak’s officials is not difficult to understand — it was not merely political theatre. It was the anguished cry of a state government watching a prize that was already at its lips being snatched away by Putrajaya.

You may also be aware that at the recently concluded 47th Bangkok International Motor Show (BIMS) 2026, a staggering 132,951 total orders were recorded — and the figure that should make everyone sit up straight is this: BYD, including its Denza marque, swept up 180,057 orders, dethroning Toyota — which had dominated Thailand for decades — and its 150,750 units, to claim the title of overall sales champion.

Eight of the top ten bestselling brands at the show were Chinese EV makers. This is no longer a story of EVs staging a comeback. This is an avalanche burying the age of the internal combustion engine.

And it all started in Rayong.

Rayong covers a mere 3,552 square kilometres — less than a sixth of Perak’s size — with a population of under one million. Yet by embracing a fully open policy framework through Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor, it has transformed itself into Thailand’s wealthiest province by per capita GDP.

BYD’s factory in Rayong is not merely a facility that tightens bolts. It houses the battery assembly lines at the heart of EV technology, the globally pioneering Blade Battery production systems — and it is breeding the automotive engineering talent that will define the next 30 years of the industry.

Building a car sets off a chain reaction across industries: local component suppliers, tax revenues, specialised equipment for technical expertise, the daily life expenditure of skilled workers and their families. When every major EV giant — BYD, Great Wall, GAC Aion — has chosen Thailand, the world’s logistics networks and EV charging infrastructure will tilt toward Thailand, creating a magnetic pull of formidable force.

What determines the prosperity of a region has never been the size of its land or the size of its population. It is the quality of its policy vision and the value of its industrial ecosystem.

Rayong is a sponge — voraciously absorbing talent and capital.

Perak, for all its vast land and university resources, is left with a field of mud. This is what it looks like when policy vision beats you at its own game.

BYD’s decision to walk away from Malaysia is not a commercial adjustment to be waved away lightly. It signals that Malaysia has lost not just a factory, but its eligibility to lead the ASEAN EV ecosystem.

We believed that by protecting the sub-RM200,000 market, we were protecting the dignity of our national car. But consumers are neither foolish nor flush with money. When Thailand uses economies of scale and tax advantages to drive costs to their absolute floor, we will end up reaching into our own pockets to buy high-value EVs made in Thailand.

We turned away the foreign investment. We turned away tens of thousands of jobs and the technology transfer that comes with them.

Yet we are perfectly content to spend our own money adding bricks to Rayong’s prosperity.

We handed capital and opportunity to Thailand with our own two hands, then congratulated ourselves with patriotic hymns about protecting the national industry.

Real protection has never been about building high walls. It is about growing fangs through the brutality of open market competition.

Thailand carries no national car burden. That is precisely why it could approach the situation with a fully market-oriented mindset — forming alliances with the world’s strongest competitors and receiving, in return, a comprehensive upgrade of its entire industrial supply chain.  

What about us? We cling to the glories of the last century and the protectionism of a bygone era, trying to navigate the tidal wave of the EV age by marking the side of a moving boat.

The wind still blows across the bare earth of Tanjung Malim. As long as the federal government remains blind to the illusion it has built inside its own greenhouse — as long as it still believes it can hold back the global tide of industrial transformation with administrative directives — BYD’s departure will prove to be the overture to Malaysia’s automotive industry’s long decline.

This prize was not lost. It was thrown away. And as long as the federal government cannot bring itself to release its suffocating embrace of the national car industry, state governments striving to attract high-technology investment will keep running headlong into this invisible wall — the wall called national interest.

A colleague from the newsroom who drove north with me summed it up with characteristic bluntness: BYD won’t be the first casualty of this infighting. And it certainly won’t be the last.