Between January and July 2018, Malaysians registered 64,668 new Hondas. In the same seven months of 2026 they registered 32,918.

Honda's Malaysian registrations have halved in eight years, and the market it competes in got 33 per cent bigger over the same period.

Chart of Malaysian car registrations January to July 2018 against 2026: Honda down 49 per cent, Nissan down 83 per cent, Proton up 232 per cent, Chery from 6 cars to 18,562
Every brand here is measured the same way: January to July 2018 against January to July 2026, so a shorter 2026 year and seasonal swings cannot distort it. Source: JPJ registrations via data.gov.my.

Table of Contents

Who fell

  • Honda: 64,668 to 32,918, down 49 per cent
  • Nissan: 15,504 to 2,652, down 83 per cent
  • Kia: 2,952 to 571, down 81 per cent
  • Hyundai: 1,771 to 389, down 78 per cent
  • Inokom: 153 to zero

Who rose

  • Proton: 34,690 to 115,028, up 232 per cent
  • Perodua: 140,926 to 190,137, up 35 per cent
  • Toyota: 53,323 to 62,413, up 17 per cent
  • Chery: 6 cars to 18,562
  • BYD: none to 6,901

The two numbers worth sitting with

Chery registered six cars in the first seven months of 2018. Eight years later it registered 18,562, which is more than Nissan, Kia, Hyundai and Inokom put together, and roughly half of Honda's total.

Proton is the bigger story and it gets less attention. It added more registrations than any other make in the comparison: 80,338 more cars in the same seven months. In 2018 Honda was ahead of Proton by 29,978 registrations. In 2026 Proton is ahead of Honda by 82,110.

What this does not say

These are registrations, not sales. A registration is the moment a vehicle is entered on the JPJ system, which is close to a sale but not identical to one, and the two can differ at the margins through fleet purchases, timing and re-registrations.

It is a brand label, not a company. A make can fall because a distributor changed, a marque was retired, or models moved to a different badge. The record shows the outcome on the road, not the reason in the boardroom, and we have not tried to supply reasons we cannot source.

We have not broken this down by state, deliberately. Of the 489,340 records for 2026, 427,798, or 87.4 per cent, carry "Rakan Niaga" in the state field, which is the JPJ partner portal rather than a location. Any state ranking would describe the remaining 12.6 per cent and would not represent the country.

And a caution about older data: the publisher notes that early records were harder to compile because collection systems were less developed. That is one reason this comparison starts at 2018 rather than reaching further back.

Check it yourself

JPJ publishes every vehicle registration in Malaysia through data.gov.my, monthly, back to 2000, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. We downloaded the 2018 and 2026 files, filtered both to January through July, and counted by maker. Anyone can reproduce every figure above, and we would rather they did.

We will run this again when the August figures publish.