KUALA LUMPUR: Perodua's first battery electric vehicle (BEV), the QV-E, took 28 months to develop at a cost of RM800mil.
The QV-E is produced at Perodua’s newest manufacturing facility named the Smart Mobility Plant.
Perodua has said the company owns the intellectual property for the BEV, including its platform.
Based on news reports, Graz, Austria-headquartered Magna Steyr was appointed as the consultant on the QV-E development project in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The QV-E has an all-new modular platform which was jointly developed by Perodua and Magna Steyr, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers.
Magna Steyr's website says it is a mobility technology company with a global, entrepreneurial-minded team of 164,000 employees and an organisational structure designed to innovate like a startup.
The group's services spans the product groups of complete vehicle development, from systems and modules to complete vehicle engineering, and complete vehicle production, where it offers flexible solutions from niche to volume production.
With 125 years of manufacturing experience, the group has developed over 40 vehicle models and produced over four million vehicles worldwide.
Magna Steyr is also the world's first vehicle contract manufacturer to produce a wide range of powertrain technologies in a single plant: from conventional drives to plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles, sometimes even on the same production line.
This highlights the group's competence as an automotive supplier also in the areas of electrification and electromobility.
Recently, Chinese automaker GAC and Magna announced a vehicle assembly programme to expand localised EV production in Europe.
Serial production of GAC’s electric SUV (sport utility vehicle) Aion V is now underway at Magna’s Graz facility.
Magna is also strengthening its presence in China with a new facility in the Jiujiang Economic Development Zone, Wuhu to support the growing demand of electric drive systems — starting with Chery and positioned to serve additional automakers in the future.
The new facility will manufacture Magna’s eDrive systems, delivering smooth, high-performance electric propulsion with a scalable architecture for a wide range of battery electric vehicles.
In October 2025, Magna also marked its first full year of scaled global production of its Driver Monitoring System (DMS), launched with a Germany-based OEM (original equipment manufacturer) in China.
Besides DMS, Magna offers a suite of interior sensing solutions, including occupant monitoring systems (OMS), child presence detection, and advanced sensor fusion technologies.
