Even as the draft of the New Energy Vehicle Policy (NEVP) 2025-2030 predicts a 30 per cent share of new electric vehicles by 2030, 90pc by 2040, and 100pc by 2050, it has not seriously touched the main issue of removing decades-old vehicles responsible for polluting air quality and promoting smog.

With business as usual, the government expects to increase its fuel import bill to $64 billion by 2060. The above policy targets new sales of NEVs with an ambitious 100pc zero-emission vehicle fleet by 2060, so the fuel bill will gradually reduce and be eliminated by 2060.

The NEVP draft, while mainly focusing on 20-year-old vehicles, lacks any serious measures to remove 30- 40-year-old private transport vehicles, many of which are visible on Karachi’s dilapidated roads.

The 30-page draft, however, carries a replacement sche­­me in which if a consumer wants to sell their old petrol/diesel vehicles to buy a NEV, the government will offer credit amounting to 20pc of the original value of the old vehicle in addition to its scrap value.

Govt outlines ambitious targets for NEV adoption yet fails to address systemic removal of decades-old polluting vehicles

The old vehicle will then be taken into government custody for removal from the national mobility portfolio. The condition is that the consumer must use the credit amount and the scrap value exclusively to purchase the NEV.

A notable auto assembler has questioned how the government will fund this 20pc or scrap value; it will be a provincial subject, but what will happen if the provincial governments do not comply? He added that tall promises in previous auto policies have also never been fully implemented.

There is a need to immediately implement the “Old Vehicles Scrapping Policy” in collaboration with provincial governments to eliminate over 20-year-old used vehicles including cars, light commercial vehicles (LCVs), pickups and vans, contributing to carbon emissions. Similar scrapping policies exist worldwide to improve the air quality in major cities.

The federal government needs to provide a fair scrap value against scrapped vehicles funded through private steel melters, 100pc registration and road tax waiver on new vehicles by provincial governments against vehicle scrapping certificates and income tax rebates up to 50pc to the filers against their income tax liability for the year on the purchase of new hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery EVs against the scrapping certificate, the assembler said.

The draft NEVP policy suggests that CO2 emissions from the transport sector currently stand at nearly 90 million tonnes without mentioning the source for this critical information. In contrast, the Pakistan Energy Yearbook suggests that the energy consumed by the transport sector in 2023 is 15m tonne of oil equivalent, translating into total CO2 emissions at under 44m tonnes.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or any other government authority must ensure that the vehicular emissions must be scientifically measured and documented to allow for sound policymaking.“The government should also conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis of all policy proposals and evaluate whether the country has enough ‘fiscal space’ to ensure policy continuity,” the assembler said.

The proposed NEVP policy roughly provides Rs4-5m worth of duty and tax subsidy per vehicle, which will cost the national exchequer approximately Rs230bn per year and cumulatively over Rs1.4 trillion over a five-year period, the assembler estimated. It will also increase our import bill by $1.3bn every year as demand will increase for NEVs given the massive concessions. The total fuel savings per year is estimated at only $100m, ignoring the cost of imported fuel used at generation plants.

The government also wants to utilise excess generation capacity. Still, experts also reveal that even if 50,000 NEVs replace fossil fuel vehicles in any given year — it will only consume 0.07pc of the 46,000MW of generation capacity — 60pc of which run on fossil fuels, coal/gas/furnace oil.

While carefully estimating, two-wheeler expert, Mohammad Sabir Sheikh said that the country’s roads are loaded with around 27m bikes of which 2m models are 30 years old, 2-2.5m are 20 years old, 5-6m are 30 years old, and 12-15m are less than 10 years old.

Due to a lack of up-grades by the local assemblers, the majority of locally assembled bikes carry Euro 2 compliant engines, which had been discontinued in the world some three decades back, he explained, urging the government to devise a policy for getting rid of obsolete old bikes to improve air quality and control smog.

Chairman All Pakistan Motor Dealers Associ­ation, H.M. Shehzad, shares that, “Many people are bound to rely on 20-year-old models due to a high cost of living as a result of inflated power and gas bills and other expenses.”

Amid the lack of any government monitoring, bike assemblers have been rolling out 30-40-year-old models without making a complete model change, and only fuel tank stickers and indicators have been changed.

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Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, December 16th, 2024