JPJ to auction ‘Malaysia’ vanity plates, personal plates looked into

The Road Transport Department (JPJ) will be offering the ‘Malaysia’ series of vanity car number plates in conjunction with the 61st National Day celebrations on Aug 31, the Transport Minister Anthony Loke announced today.

He said this will be followed up with vanity places featuring various states in Malaysia in September or October, and the government is also studying the possibility of introducing personal vanity plates.

In line with his directive to stop outsourcing the lucrative rights to offer vanity plates to the public, Loke said the bidding process would be handled by the JPJ alone and the funds raised would go into the federal government’s consolidated fund.

The government needs a higher revenue and when it comes to transport. I, as the minister of transport, can ask the cabinet for more funds if the JPJ can raise more revenue.

“So, it is a form of cross-subsidy. If we can raise revenue, we can also ask the government to allocate more for transport,” Loke told a press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.

He said the V-series licence plate number auctions had fetched RM22.48 million, whereas the F-series fetched RM17.55 million. The highest single bid for each series - for the licence plates V1 and F1 - was RM989,780 and RM836,660 respectively.

Loke also noted that the most expensive vanity plate in Malaysian history is “Patriot 1”, which fetched RM1,308,000. Unfortunately, he said, the money went to Yayasan Patriot Negara, to which the right to auction the Patriot series was sold at RM1 million.

Bidding to run from July 2 till 16

Bidding for the Malaysia series vanity plates will run from July 2 until July 16, and the results will be announced on Aug 23. Bidding can be done through any JPJ office nationwide.

All numbers from “Malaysia 1” to “Malaysia 9999” will be up for grabs, except for “Malaysia 2020”, which has been reserved for Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Loke said this is because the Vision 2020 concept was Mahathir’s brainchild, so it will be offered to the prime minister and it would be up to him whether he wants to accept it.

He said he expects the Malaysia series vanity plates to do as well as the V series, which is to raise at least RM22 million.

Asked for updates on the government’s move to bar vehicles fitted with defective Takata airbags from renewing their road tax, Loke said he would be making announcements tomorrow evening, after meeting representatives from Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Mazda and Lexus.

“The numbers of affected cars are huge, and what concerns me is that many people are not aware of their cars being recalled. That is the reason why, besides Honda, there are other brands where the replacement rate for the airbags is very low.

“There are brands where only 30 percent of the cars have been recalled and new airbags replaced, meaning that there are still many cars on the road that still use dangerous airbags,” he said.

The move to ban cars fitted with defective Takata airbags from renewing the road tax followed a fatal accident on May 30, where a defective Takata airbagclaimed its 23rd death, worldwide.

The problem is from a defective inflator that sprays deadly metal shrapnel at its users upon activation, triggering the largest automotive safety recall in history. Some 100 million inflators involving 19 major automakers are affected by the recall. -Mkini