Proton Saga History

The Proton Saga rolled off the line on July 9, 1985, becoming Malaysia's first mass-produced car and a symbol of Mahathir Mohamad's national industrialisation drive. Built on the Mitsubishi Lancer Fiore platform with 1.3L and 1.5L Mitsubishi Orion engines, it was an immediate hit — within months it was Malaysia's best-selling car.

The Iswara facelift arrived in August 1992 with restyled bodywork (it was named after the great Helen butterfly of Sarawak) and continued the Mitsubishi engine range; it became the workhorse of the Malaysian taxi fleet. A modernised LMST variant followed from 2003 to 2008, by which point the original first-generation lineage had run more than two decades.

A clean-sheet second generation (BLM, 2008) arrived with the indigenously developed 1.3L CamPro IAFM engine and drew over 23,000 pre-orders in its first two weeks. The third generation launched in September 2016 with a 1.3L VVT engine and a four-star ASEAN NCAP safety rating. A fourth-generation MC3 followed in late 2025 with an all-new 1.5L i-GT engine on a modular A-segment architecture. Over 2 million Sagas have been sold across 39 years.