The blind spot in our green transition: How Malaysia’s EV policies deepen social injustice

MALAYSIA is hurtling towards an electric vehicle (EV) future, spurred on by an aggressive suite of government incentives, corporate tax holiday and ambitious sustainability targets.

On paper, the goal is noble: slash carbon emissions, modernise our national fleet and position the country as a regional green hub. However, strip away the glossy marketing of zero-emission driving, and a troubling reality emerges.

Our current EV and residential renewable energy policies are inadvertently functioning as a massive, regressive wealth transfer — subsidising the lifestyles of the affluent at the expense of working-class Malaysians while masking a heavy environmental toll.

The narrative that EVs are inherently "green" collapses when subjected to a rigorous cradle-to-grave lifecycle assessment. An EV rolls out of the assembly line carrying a massive "carbon debt". Manufacturing an EV requires significantly more precious and heavy metals — lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese — than a standard internal combustion engine (ICE) car.

The extraction of these materials involves intensive, environmentally destructive mining operations globally, often powered by heavy fossil fuels.

Furthermore, an EV is only as clean as the electricity grid that charges it. Malaysia still relies overwhelmingly on coal and natural gas for power generation. When a vehicle switches from petroleum to an electricity grid anchored by fossil fuels, it isn't eliminating emissions; it is merely shifting them from a tailpipe to a power plant smokestack.

Given the immense carbon footprint of battery production and our current energy mix, an EV must be driven for years just to achieve carbon parity with a modern ICE vehicle.

Yet, despite this ambiguous ecological footprint, our fiscal policies treat the EV as an unmitigated public good, resulting in severe social injustice.

Governments globally have often flirted with personal income tax reliefs for EV purchases. While it sounds like a logical incentive on a spreadsheet, it is structurally flawed.

In Malaysia, where only a fraction of the population earns enough to pay substantial personal income tax, an EV purchase incentive exclusively benefits those who can already afford a

RM150,000+ premium vehicle.

The lower and middle-income groups (B40 and M40), who pay little to no income tax and rely on affordable mass-market ICE cars like Peroduas or Protons, receive zero benefit.

While the government wisely limited this by ending fully imported (CBU) tax exemptions and imposing a RM100,000 price floor, the fundamental philosophy remains skewed: taxpayer-funded structural shifts are being leveraged to cater to a luxury demographic.

This inequality worsens when we look at how these vehicles are refueled at home. Proponents of EV adoption heavily champion residential Time-of-Use (ToU) tariff, which offers heavily discounted electricity rates late at night.

For an affluent EV owner living in a landed property, the playbook is simple and highly lucrative. They drive home, plug their vehicle into a private 11kW wallbox, and program it to charge after 10pm. They pull massive, industrial-scale amounts of electricity from the grid at the cheapest possible off-peak rate, essentially enjoying subsidised "fuel".

Compare this to the daily reality of a hard-working family living in a walk-up, low-cost flat or an older apartment complex. They cannot shift their lifestyle to the middle of the night.

Their peak electricity usage happens between 6pm and 10pm when they cook, run fans or air conditioning, and prepare their children for school. They are locked into the most expensive peak tariff rates.

Furthermore, to even access these discounted night rates, a household requires a Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) Smart Meter, technology that has systematically rolled out to wealthy, landed neighbourhoods first, leaving high-density, lower-income housing at the back of the queue.

The distortion repeats itself on the rooftop. Schemes like Solar ATAP allow affluent homeowners to spend tens of thousands of ringgit upfront on solar panels to slash their energy bills to near zero. An apartment dweller who does not legally own the building's roof is structurally barred from participating. Yet, the physical grid — transformers, cables and substations — must still be upgraded and maintained by TNB to handle the massive strain of nightly EV charging and two-way solar power flow.

As high-income earners opt out of the standard tariff pool, the multi-billion ringgit cost of grid upgrades will inevitably be recouped via baseline tariff hikes and fuel surcharges. The flat-dweller carries the financial burden of an infrastructure upgraded to serve the bungalow owner.

If we continue down this path, our green transition will be built on a foundation of socioeconomic disparity. We risk creating a society where the working class subsidises the clean energy shelters of the rich.

We must urgently rethink our strategy. Green policy should focus on systemic equity, not individual luxury. Taxpayer funds and grid incentives should be aggressively redirected away from private cars and towards the wholesale electrification of public transport, such as electric bus fleets that serve the masses.

Solar incentives should be funneled into community solar projects on public housing blocks to directly lower the shared maintenance bills of low-income families.

Climate action cannot come at the cost of social justice. If Malaysia’s transition to a green economy requires the working class to carry the financial burden while the wealthy enjoy the perks, then it is a transition that is fundamentally broken.

CHONG KOK BOON

Shah Alam