HSR 'postponed', may be necessary in the future, says PM

Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said the High-Speed Rail (HSR) to Singapore is too expensive, too short and unaffordable for Malaysia in the near term.

While he believes that there will be a need for such as service in the future - one that spans the entire breadth of the peninsula - it has to be postponed for now.

"High-speed trains are most effective where the distance is very long. But where the distance is short, it doesn't contribute much. So we need to rethink the high-speed rail.

"We cannot say we will never have high-speed rail in Malaysia. What we can do is we can postpone the project because it is far too costly at this moment," Mahathir told the Nikkei Asian Reviewin Putrajaya on June 8.

The Najib Abdul Razak administration had planned to build the 350km HSR from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and it was supposed to cut down travel time to 90 minutes and form the centrepiece of Bandar Malaysia - a new development project initiated by 1MDB.

Japan has expressed strong interest in bidding for the project and introduce its famed Shinkanzen (bullet train, photo) technology to the tropics.

However, one of the first acts of the Mahathir administration was to announce the scrapping of the HSR project on grounds that it is far too expensive and unviable at this time.

On plans for Proton, Mahathir said there does not appear to be any plan to expand sales of the car to China.

"The company believes that Malaysia can produce only a right-hand drive car and it should confine itself to the right-hand drive market, which means we have no access to the huge market in China.

"That will limit our growth," he said.

Instead, he said his administration was looking to create a different car company that would produce cars that conform to the Euro-5 or Euro-6 emission standards to have access to the world market.

"We are also looking to Japan for some cooperation at initial stages. Like the first national car, which started with only 18 percent local content (and cooperation from) Mitsubishi Motor, we were able to master the whole process of building the car, from design to clay-model and test car.

"Today, modern technology is based more on sensors and other things. We need to acquire that also. But initially, we want just to build a car first for the Malaysian market, and then for the world market," he said.

On the next engine of growth, Mahathir said that the previous administration's decision to collaborate with Alibaba was a "good idea" and Malaysia's Digital Free Trade Zone will continue.

"(However), we need to look at other places for new technology. We see in Silicon Valley, California, there are a lot of new ideas that have come up, making use of IT and sensors used in building driverless cars.

"We also see remote-control (systems) being developed to such an extent that you can actually fly a plane without a pilot. And we have many new ideas coming up with regard to medicine and other fields," he said.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma is expected to pay Mahathir a visit soon. Mkini

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