Perodua Aruz - 300 Orders Collected On First Day Of Booking

As of Friday, Perodua has collected over 300 bookings for its first ever seven-seater Perodua Aruz SUV. This was confirmed by Perodua’s new President and CEO Dato Zainal Abidin Ahmad, who took over from Datuk Dr Aminar Rashid Salleh in December.

Bookings for the Aruz were opened at 11am last Thursday. Speaking to the The Edge at a Perodua vendors’ event in Rawang on Friday, Dato Zainal added further that 60 percent of the bookings are for the higher grade AV variant, which has an estimated price of RM 77,200.

“We plan sales of about 2,000 plus a month [for this year]," he told The Edge.

Dato Zainal also added that the Aruz is not a direct competitor to the Proton X70, which sits in a different segment.

"Our SUV is not really a C-segment vehicle; it is a B-segment car so it is a compact SUV. So I don't think it is a direct competition [to the X70]," he said.

Regarding the timing of the Aruz’s impending launch, which is happening very soon after the Proton X70’s launch in December, Dato Zainal said the close timing was a coincidence.

"We have planned from the beginning to launch [Aruz] sometime in January, and it is so happened that Proton launched [X70] around the same time as well. It is indeed part of our development strategy and it is as per our development schedule," he said.

Perodua has yet to announce on the exact launch date of the Aruz, but it’s likely to be well within this quarter. The seven-seater Perodua Aruz is closely related to the Indonesian market Daihatsu Terios and the Toyota Rush. In Malaysia, the latter is assembled by Perodua in Rawang, with both the Perodua and Toyota sharing the same Toyota 2NR-VE Dual VVT-I 1.5-litre engine paired to 4-speed automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Perodua’s version however, has been significantly re-engineered, with its own Malaysia-specific exterior and interior design.