It has however been confirmed for the first mass-produced Perodua EV to arrive next year!
There has certainly been a lot of chatter recently regarding Perodua’s first EV, after MITI Minister Tengku Zafrul having spilled the beans on social media about it being set to arrive by the tail end of 2025.
But while most of the media’s attention was drawn towards the possibility of Malaysia’s first home-grown EV arriving by the end of next year, there was actually another lesser-discussed detail regarding the aformentioned Facebook post of Tengku Zafrul’s that should probably be discussed further. And that is for the aforementioned ministerial post to have included the attached hashtags of #Milan and #Italy.
So… is the first all-electric P2 product going to be having some Italian involvement?
Now just to temper expectations on Perodua possibly outfitting its next EV with tech from Ferrari, it is worth noting here that the suggested Italian involvement may purely be circumstantial thus far. Such is especially as our current MITI minister was indeed on an official trip to Milan when he posted about this development, and those hashtags were incidentally the same as to be found in a generic string of hashtags that his team used for all posts made during his time abroad.
Though there is nevertheless still hope for some la dolce vita influence to be finding its way into the first Perodua EV, as Tengku Zafrul did mention in that Facebook post for the Malaysian automaker to be working with an as-yet-unnamed international collaborator. More tellingly too for the Italian partnership is that accompanying the post was a series of photos showing the MITI minister in a meeting with angmohs on the other side of the table, with one photo even showing two blue model sedans in the background.
The identities of said caucasian business people unfortunately were not officially disclosed in the post, nor were any of the finer meeting discussion points. In fact, even the logo and captions for the figures displayed on the TV screen in were annoyingly blurred out to effectively put an end to any further sleuthing regarding this particular topic thus far.
In any case however, one could potentially hypothesise from this post that Perodua could be in talks with an Italian OEM like Marelli for it to supply electric motors in P2’s first EV. Or perhaps we might see the Malaysian automaker’s first EV be penned by one of many iconic design studios in Italy, which would certainly bring things back full circle from the time when Marcello Gandini helped in the design of the Kancil.
What this potential of Italian involvement does also point to is for Perodua to possibly be expanding away from its long-term partnership with Daihatsu in its upcoming EV era. A possibility that is made all the more plausible considering that its historical Japanese doesn’t actually have any full EVs in its range at present for the Malaysian automaker to crib a platform from, with its future as a company not being the most certain too after this most recent crash test scandal.
