Just looked at various car prices in Malaysia... new and second hand. O....M....G!! It's nearly as bad as Singapore!! They have got to be kidding, right?? Singapore I can understand.... little island, smaller than the Isle Of Wight, big population, but very good public transport. But Malaysia? It's nearly 70,000Km2 bigger than the UK, and less than half the population..... what's the paranoia with cars???

Tax and corruption. But mainly corruption.

But if you convert it to Sin dollar it aint that bad.

If you get MM2H you can get a tax-free car

Well, pay oodles for an MM2H or oodles for a car.... it's still paying oodles! They're about three times the price of what we pay here in Canada. I hope every country that exports cars to Malaysia puts 110% tax on their rubber, or whatever it is they export!

And I just looked at the Ford Malaysia website.... wtf??? Do those cars come from the 80's???? Ford Everest.... you have got to be kidding, this is 2013!

Avoid the tax by purchasing a Malaysia marque

I thought they only made Protons? Er, I'd rather pay the tax!

So I can import any car with literally no import tax?

How many per family or is it just one per family?

Tsk tsk geedee - slagging off Protons when you were seriously considering a Ford??!!

Yes cars are the next ridiculously expensive thing about living here other than housing.

I'm sure I'll hear the guffaws from here - but we have two Kias (a Sorento and a Picanto) and I LOVE my Kias. We also had a Carens at home. It was nice to make that comment one day to the stuck up ahem moo that I met in Singapore who was commenting on how people "drive around Singapore in cars you would never consider having at home like Kias...".

I enjoyed putting her in her place .

I drive a Lincoln now, and it's a seriously nice machine! They don't sell them in Malaysia, so I looked at Ford... the new Ford Explorer is a very, very nice car. But they only offer the Everest... it looks like it's from the 80's!
A friend has the Sorento and raves about it.... good choice!
I'm now looking at importing my own car and paying the 110% tax... it will still work out cheaper than paying £100,000 for a similar car there... I'd want a house for that!!

I don't know all the fine details re importing. Suggest you look at either the MM2H gov site or the MM2H info site..... Unless anyone else on here knows the answers.

We looked into importing last year - mainly because I'd bought a second-hand Jaguar XF - it was 3 years old and cost around £19K. The cost to import it into Malaysia was over £40K! I had to bite the bullet and sell it back to the Jaguar dealer I bought it from 5 months previously..... a bit of strong-ish negotiation on my part brought me down from having to pay them £4,500 to only having to give them £3,000 to take it back!

You have to pay 3 taxes (1 of which is the duty). I can't remember which is which. You start off with the invoice value of the car, then you have to add the cost of shipping it to Malaysia plus the insurance for the shipping. That is called the 'landed' (as in landed in Malaysia) cost. First up there is 10% to add to the landed cost; secondly (because it was over 2.5L) you add 110% (there is a sliding scale below 2.5L, down to about 80% or 85%) to the first sub-total and finally you take the new total and add another 30%!!! Another couple of rules about importing cars:

1 You have to have owned the car for a minimum of 3 years before you can import it;
2 After you import it, you cannot then sell it within 12 months of importing!

Until I saw these 2 rules, I did think about paying the import duty and taxes, because I was told I could sell a 3 or 4 year old Jag XF for around RM1/2M!

Malaysia deliberately make the price of ALL foreign cars (even the likes of Honda, a lot of which are actually manufactured in Malaysia) exorbitantly expensive as they want to 'encourage' and promote Proton (which is government owned).

Also, I think under MM2H you can only import 1 car, and you can only do that once.

Oh dear.... looks like I'm going to have to flog my pride and joy here and stump up for a banger over there! But, I won't be seen dead in a Proton!!

I did notice that the car purchase schemes are 10 years rather than the normal 3.....!

Hang on a minute.... a Lotus Exige costs £29k in the UK. It's listed new for £70k in Malaysia.... I thought Lotus was now Malaysian (owned by Proton.... oh, the shame ) Does it only apply to crappy Malaysian cars??