BMW M3, X3 and VW Tiguan to be High Performance Police escort vehicles for VIPs in Malaysia?

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What a day it has been. It turns out that the Royal Malaysia Police (PDRM) may in fact be conducting evaluation tests on the BMW M3, X3 and Volkswagen Tiguan, likely as candidates to be used as high-speed escort vehicles.

Now, neither BMW Malaysia nor Volkswagen Passenger Car Malaysia could be reached for an official statement at the time of writing, though we were told outright by BMW Malaysia earlier in the day that the supplied vehicles were for a movie production, and reported based on the info given to us at the time.

It’s unclear what the nature of the arrangement is with PDRM, and it is possible the parties involved may have been (or still are) under strict non-disclosure. No materials relating to the matter have been found on PDRM’s official Facebook page and website, landing further credence to the NDA theory. Nevertheless, we truly do apologise for the misinformation.

Editor’s note: We did our best to clarify the story with credible sources, and were explicitly informed by BMW Group Malaysia’s head of corporate communication, Sashi Ambi that the vehicles were indeed supplied by BMW, for use as movie props. Alas, that has proven to be false information. Please accept my sincere apologies on this. – Hafriz Shah

Anyway, new photos uploaded to the Friends of PDRM page on Facebook showed police officials posing at the Bukit Aman foyer with the quintet, complete with new Polis High Performance liveries. Based on the caption, all five vehicles appear to belong to IPK Selangor’s escort division (CPP).

In the photo, the words “cadangan uji nilai” or evaluation vehicles can be clearly seen, so it’s very likely the cars were officially supplied by the two aforementioned companies. This means no public funds were involved, despite widespread online comments claiming as such. Honda Malaysia also supplied a unit of the FK8 Civic Type R back in 2019, although that was intended to be the Evo X Helang replacement.

Again, we apologise for the misinformation, and watch this space for an official update. In the meantime, what do you think of the M3 as an escort vehicle? Overkill, or not?

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