It’s cheaper to buy a car in Singapore and Brunei than Malaysia

First, let us point out how we define cheap to buy a car - we took the average car cost for the same model (Toyota Corolla) and weighted it against the average annual salary in each country.

This gives us the percentage of a country’s average annual salary required to buy a car. All figures were sourced from numbeo.com.

Let’s start with Malaysia, according to the source, the average monthly net salary is RM 3,429. Multiply that by 12 for the annual salary and we’ll get RM 41,148. The price of a Toyota Corolla stated at the site is RM 121,688. Weigh those figures together and the percentage of annual salary required is 295.7%.

Also read: Malaysians pay over RM 10 billion in car taxes every year. How did we end up like this?

Comparatively, the average monthly net salary in Singapore is SGD 5,214, which translates to an annual salary of SGD 62,568 while a Toyota Corolla is priced at SGD 107,499. Those numbers calculate to a percentage of 171.8%.

This means it’s almost twice as affordable for an average Singaporean to buy a car than for the average Malaysian in the respective countries.

We’ve also looked at neighbouring countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Here are the percentage figures:

Based on the figures, Indonesia is the most expensive country listed above to buy a car. Though the surprise came from Singapore because if we were to take the absolute price of a car, it would’ve been the most expensive. But when average salary considered, it becomes a different story.

However, these numbers are the average value which can be one-dimensional as standard deviation isn’t taken into account. Perhaps the distribution curve of salaries differ greatly from one country to another.

Nevertheless, it has been interesting to find out the affordability of cars in our surrounding countries. We’ve said before that cars in Malaysia are expensive but it really put things into perspective in comparison.

Also read: Want cheaper cars in Malaysia? Best solution is to pay higher fuel prices