Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Malaysia's First Driverless Van Takes to Public Roads

A delivery van with nobody inside is about to become a normal sight in Cyberjaya. Autonomous Logistic Solutions, known as ALS, is set to begin a six-month public road trial of its Level 4 driverless RoboVan in the Malaysian tech city. The company says it is the first time a Malaysian company has been authorised to deploy a fully driverless Level 4 autonomous vehicle on public roads with a valid licence plate.

Not a closed test track. Not a private compound. Public roads, real traffic, and a green electric-vehicle plate like any other road user.

From mail centre shifts to a 22-kilometer route

The RoboVan earned its public debut the slow way. Before this deployment, it completed a six-month trial at the Pos Malaysia National Mail Centre in Shah Alam, logging over 1,000 kilometers in a closed environment. The work was point-to-point pallet transfers across at least two daily shifts – unglamorous, repetitive freight work, which is exactly where driverless vehicles tend to prove themselves first.

The public trial is a step up in every dimension. It will run along the Malaysia Autonomous Vehicle test route in Cyberjaya, a 22-kilometer loop taking in Persiaran APEC, Persiaran Cyberpoint Selatan, Persiaran Rimba Permai, Persiaran Cyberpoint 5 and the surrounding Futurise area. The van will share the road with busy business districts, commercial hubs, educational institutions, MRT stations, multi-lane intersections and pedestrian crossings. Oversight comes from a dedicated ALS Remote Operations Centre in Cyberjaya, where operators monitor the vehicle and its remote-supervision systems.

The stated goals are practical: evaluate performance, system reliability, responses in mixed traffic, remote supervision, and how the vehicle fits into active logistics workflows. The public can also see the RoboVan in person at Transport Expo Asia 2026 at MITEC Kuala Lumpur, which opens to the public on October 22.

The van itself

The RoboVan is built purely for cargo, with no passengers. It is based on the Zelos Z10 fully electric autonomous vehicle, developed in collaboration with Zelostech, which describes itself as the world’s largest RoboVan enterprise. ALS is Zelostech’s exclusive Malaysian partner and handles implementation, integration and operation locally.

The cargo numbers are serious. The van offers 10 cubic meters of cargo space and a maximum payload of 1,500 kilograms. Its sensor suite combines LiDAR, a traffic-light detection camera, a surveillance camera and surrounding-view cameras. Top speed is 55 km/h, which suits urban and suburban delivery routes rather than highway hauling. A 34.5 kWh LFP battery provides a range of up to 210 kilometers on a single charge. A full recharge takes about 3 hours on DC charging, or between 7 and 11.5 hours on AC – slow enough to plan around overnight depot charging, fast enough on DC for a midday turnaround.

One small detail from the launch tells its own story. The blue-labelled plate shown at the event is not the plate the RoboVan will use on the road. The real registration will be a standard green-labelled plate issued for electric vehicles. Driverless, yes. But on paper, deliberately ordinary.

What it means for cities, logistics and travelers

For logistics operators, the Cyberjaya trial is a template for how a local company can take a global autonomous platform and localize it – permits, operations centre, route selection, integration with a national postal customer’s workflow. That template is reusable far beyond one city. The same pattern is appearing in freight at larger scales, from driverless trucks being prepared for 400 km routes in South Korea to the small sidewalk machines now handling food orders, like the delivery robots that rolled into Britain with Deliveroo this week.

For cities, a six-month public trial with a defined route and a local operations centre offers something valuable: data under local conditions. Rain, heat, mixed traffic, school zones, station crowds. A regulator who has watched 22 kilometers of real operation knows more than one who has read a hundred slide decks.

For everyday travelers and residents, the change is mostly about familiarity. A driverless van that shows up on schedule, carries real cargo and follows the same rules as everyone else stops being a spectacle quickly. That is the point. The future of delivery will not announce itself with a parade. It will arrive as a quiet electric van on Persiaran APEC, doing its rounds, with an empty driver’s seat that fewer people bother to photograph each week.

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