Jakarta. Indonesian developers of an electric car have reached a deal for funding from a Malaysian investor, saying there has been little domestic interest in the project.

“We’ve made a partnership with an investor from Malaysia, not the Malaysian government,” Ricky Elson, the lead developer of the Selo project, said on Thursday as quoted by Viva.co.id.

He did not say how much funding had been pledged or who the investor was.

“We agreed to stay quiet about the details and development of the car,” he added.

Ricky wrote about the partnership in a post on his Facebook page last Sunday, in which his references to M and KL are believed to mean Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur.

As of Thursday, the post received more than 6,500 likes and 1,100 comments, most of them criticizing the decision to get funding from Malaysia rather than from inside the country.

Ricky said the team took up the offer because they felt they were not getting any support from within Indonesia.

The Selo project was initially supported by Dahlan Iskan, the former minister for state-owned enterprises, but government interest in the venture tailed off following the change of government last year.

Ricky and Danet Suryatama, the main developers behind the project, both previously worked on Dahlan’s experimental Tucuxi electric car. Originally envisioned to be produced entirely using locally produced components, the present project will be 70 percent domestically sourced and built, while the electric motor will be imported.

The developer claim that once finished, the car will have a top speed of 220 kilometers per hour and require just four hours for a full charge. They also plan to fit regenerative brakes to recover energy when braking and pipe it back into the electrical system.