GRAB Malaysia has welcomed the Transport Ministry’s decision to grant a three-month extension for e-hailing drivers to obtain the public service vehicle (PSV) licence. 

The e-hailing operator said it now has 20% fewer drivers today when the PSV licence requirement is enforced.

“We welcome our Minister of Transport, YB Anthony Loke’s announcement today for a ‘soft landing’ approach in enforcing the new e-hailing regulations.” Grab Malaysia said in a statement today. 

“On behalf of our Grab community, we are truly appreciative, as within hours today, we had already experienced a drop of almost 20% in the number of driver-partners on the road, which resulted in difficulties for our passengers in getting a ride, and a loss of income for many of our driver-partners.”

Transport Minister Anthony Loke today said  that e-hailing drivers without the PSV licence could continue operating for three months.

This “soft landing”, he said, would allow more time for e-hailing drivers to meet requirements.

Grab said the extension was “a fair decision”, and was a departure from statements made by certain parties against its drivers. 

The operator said its drivers had been accused of making excuses and leaving the PSV licence to the last minute. 

Grab said that several key requirements, such as training and examinations, were formalised only three months ago, while others were put in place just days ago, such as e-hailing sticker designs that were shared with e-hailing operators last week.

The company said it will focus on building its “Pakej Pikul Bersama” programmes which were designed to help its drivers reduce costs and time involved in meeting the various regulatory requirements.

“Our immediate focus is to help solve and unblock capacity issues in the authorities’ branches and processes that were not designed to handle such a large volume of applications.

“Since the start of the various processes from mid-April, most of our manpower had been focused on unblocking these capacity constraints, including to arrange large exam halls to avoid the backlog at driving schools, and to streamline the public service vehicle (PSV) licence application process by collating and submitting documents on behalf of our drivers to Road Transport Department for processing.” – July 12, 2019.