How many of the cars are still running and road taxed?
This is the question. In Malaysia on any given day we see cars abandoned all over the place, in neighborhoods, gated communities and even in car parks. Over the years many car workshop owners have had customers bringing their old cars for some major repair and then having in-adequate funds to pay the repair bill and so the cars get parked outside the workshop for months and even years and the workshop has ‘capital’ tied up in these cars.
The workshop owner cannot sell the car and after a while they might take out some of the parts to used by other customers, or the cars get towed and scrapped by the town council as they have lots of ‘unpaid parking tickets’. Just drive to Subang Jaya USJ1 or Taman Medan off Old Klang Road where there are dozens of car workshops and you will see hundreds of cars rotting away.
Then there are car owners who have sentimental attachments to their old cars, not classic cars, just old cars and they just do not want to sell them. Drive along any housing community and you will definitely spot one to two or more sitting inside a garage or even outside rotting under our weather. Stop and ask the owner if they willing to sell and you will get a firm ‘NO’!
Then you also have many cheap older cars being sold to foreigners who come to Malaysia to work or even study. They buy cheap sub RM10,000 cars like a old W124 Benz or a first generation Camry and they run it to the ground in the 1 to 2 years and then just dump the car at the airport on the flight back home or just leave it parked at their low cost flat car park.
Lets not forget the dearly departed and their cars. There are many older Malaysians who ‘pass away’ and their cars cannot be transferred to a new owner and their living children find the process too difficult and tiresome and just give up and let the car rot away.
So, when a recent e report mentioned that there are 33.3 million vehicles in Malaysia and the population in the country is slightly lower at 32.6 million, it was not a mistake. However, this is the total number registered for use since April 1946 and Malaysia does not have a car scrapping policy which exports old cars to third world countries (like with Singapore).
So, how many cars are road taxed and running should be the question asked and how many cars are in the country and NOT road taxed is what we want to know.
