Beijing based Neolix just won approval to join Zelos on Malaysia's flagship autonomous vehicle test route, turning a regulatory sandbox into a live, parallel comparison of two Chinese fleets.
Malaysia's Ministry of Transport has quietly turned its flagship smart-city test corridor into something more unusual: a controlled, on-road comparison between two Chinese autonomous-delivery fleets. The regulator approved Beijing-based Neolix, one of China's largest makers of small robot delivery vans, to begin public-road trials under the country's National Regulatory Sandbox (NRS) for autonomous vehicles. The first phase is expected to begin in the coming weeks on the roughly seven-kilometre MyAV route through Cyberjaya, the planned city south of Kuala Lumpur that already serves as Malaysia's AV proving ground.
Neolix is the second Chinese autonomous-delivery player to win Malaysian approval. Rival Zelos, another leading Chinese RoboVan maker, has been operating in Cyberjaya with national postal operator Pos Malaysia since January, giving it a roughly six-month head start on local roads. With Neolix now cleared to join, the two largest Chinese players in the category are directly contesting the same Malaysian last-mile delivery market.
That framing matters. The NRS framework is running two parallel Chinese autonomous-delivery fleets on staged trials rather than picking one. Most countries staging foreign AV trials do so one vendor at a time, then choose. Malaysia is running both against each other on the same corridor, with the same regulator, under the same legal framework, with phased public-road access gating who gets to scale. According to the Paul Tan report on the approval, Neolix's testing program will move from closed-road validation through semi-open conditions and only then onto public roads, with the public-road phase covering traffic-signal handling, intersection negotiation, and speed-bump management. The Star reports the same staged structure, and Business Times Singapore and Vietnam's VIR both place Neolix in the NRS first cohort.
Where the two camps diverge sharply is in their Malaysian partner ecosystems. Zelos is anchored to Pos Malaysia, giving it direct access to a national last-mile network. Neolix's local consortium, as the company lists it in its press release distributed via PR Newswire, includes Tiong Nam Logistics, Asia Mobiliti and its Trek autonomous-mobility platform, and MindHub. The framing of the move as part of a broader Southeast Asia expansion comes from the same company release rather than independent reporting.
The legal hook holding this together is Malaysia's Road Transport Act 1987, which the NRS framework uses as the umbrella statute for granting time-bounded exemptions to autonomous-vehicle operators. None of the publicly available coverage includes a primary MOT announcement or the underlying NRS technical guidelines. The granular evaluation criteria, including what the regulator is actually measuring on the Cyberjaya route and what performance bar a fleet must clear to scale beyond it, are not yet on the public record.
A regulatory sandbox that runs two foreign AV vendors in parallel only works if the regulator can credibly judge between them, and if the testing rubric is rigorous enough that the eventual winner's commercial rollout is defensible to Malaysian workers, regulators in other Asean markets, and the public. The Cyberjaya corridor is now effectively the audition stage for whoever wants to scale driverless last-mile delivery across the country.
What to watch next: whether the NRS releases its evaluation framework publicly before the public-road phase begins, whether Pos Malaysia's incumbent route network or the Neolix consortium's broader logistics-and-tech stack pulls ahead on the staged milestones, and whether more foreign vendors enter the same first-cohort sandbox before 2H 2026 closes.