Between January and July 2026, Malaysians registered 489,340 new cars. 38,675 of them, close to 1 in 13, were fully electric. In the same seven months of 2018, the figure was six.
That is the speed of a shift most people still file under "a few years away". Battery-electric cars made up 7.9 per cent of new registrations in the first seven months of 2026, up from 4.2 per cent a year earlier. The share has risen every year since 2022, and it nearly doubled again this year.
The figures come from JPJ vehicle registration records, published monthly by the Ministry of Transport through data.gov.my. To keep the comparison fair, every year above counts January to July only, because 2026 is not finished. On that matched basis the climb is unbroken: 860 electric cars in the first seven months of 2022, then 5,346 in 2023, 12,547 in 2024, 19,935 in 2025, and 38,675 so far in 2026. That is already 86 per cent of last year's full-year total of 44,813, with five months still to run.
One caveat runs through all of this: registrations are not the same as sales. A registration is the point at which a car is entered onto the road under JPJ. It is the standard national measure and the one the government publishes, but a car can be registered some time after it is bought, or booked to a fleet. Every figure here counts registrations, so read them as registrations, not sales.
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The most-registered electric car in Malaysia is a Proton
Neither Tesla nor BYD leads Malaysia's EV registrations. In the first seven months of 2026, more new battery-electric Protons were registered, 16,458, than cars of any other brand, as the chart at the top of this article shows. That is more than BYD (6,901) and Tesla (2,567) combined, and more than the next four brands put together.
Most of it is a single model. The e.MAS 5, Proton's smaller and cheaper electric car, accounted for 13,067 of that total, with the e.MAS 7 adding another 3,391. Proton's own newsroom names the e.MAS 5 as Malaysia's number-one EV model.
A year ago the order was reversed. In January to July 2025, BYD led with 6,270 registrations and Proton sat second on 4,689. Proton's electric registrations have since more than tripled, while BYD's grew only slightly. The national carmaker now leads the market it trailed a year ago.
What the number does, and does not, say
Three limits matter. First, "electric" here means battery-electric only. Petrol hybrids are a separate category in the data, and they added another 29,762 registrations in the same seven months, 6.1 per cent of the market. So battery-electric is the narrowest reading of "electric", not the widest. Second, 2026 covers January to July only, as the August figures are due around the tenth of September. Third, these are national totals, which the JPJ data supports well. A breakdown by state is not reliable, because most rows are recorded against a dealer portal rather than a location.
Even inside those limits, the shape is clear. Petrol still dominates new registrations, at 81.6 per cent. But battery-electric registrations have gone from six in the first seven months of 2018 to 38,675 this year, and a Malaysian brand is out in front of them.
Source: JPJ vehicle registration data, published by the Ministry of Transport of Malaysia via data.gov.my. Counts by Val Media. Proton model figure from Proton e.MAS.
