Govt Targets 30% Electric Vehicles in Five Years — USD 4.5 Billion Annual Fuel Savings on the Line

Pakistan's federal cabinet has been briefed on a plan to convert 30% of the country's vehicle fleet to electric within five years, a transition the Power Division estimates will save the country roughly USD 4.5 billion a year in petroleum imports — and reshape the load profile of the national grid in the process.

The briefing, chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, brought together Federal Ministers Musadik Malik (Climate Change), Ahsan Iqbal (Planning), Awais Leghari (Power), Ahad Cheema (Establishment), Atta Tarar (Information), and Muhammad Aurangzeb (Finance) — the full economic and energy cabinet, not just the auto sector. That signals the EV Policy 2025-30 has now moved from line-ministry initiative to whole-of-government priority.

The numbers on the table

Officials presented progress already locked in under the policy:

• 72 manufacturing certificates issued for electric motorcycles and rickshaws — overwhelmingly the early-volume segment because two-wheelers carry 70%+ of Pakistan's daily passenger trips.
• 4 certificates issued for electric cars — small in count but symbolically important since they mark the first wave of Pakistan-assembled passenger EVs.
• 123 applications received for EV charging station establishment, reflecting genuine private-sector pull behind a charging network the Power Division has been struggling to scale from the top down.

The Grade-16 motorcycle scheme

The standout deliverable announced at the meeting: government employees up to Grade 16 will receive electric motorcycles on easy instalment plans. That's a workforce of roughly 1.2 million federal and provincial employees — enough volume on its own to anchor 2–3 years of two-wheeler-assembler order books and prove out servicing economics at scale.

The PM directed that subsidies under the National EV Policy reach low-income groups transparently and without bureaucratic friction — a pointed instruction reflecting concern that earlier solar net-metering subsidies have been captured by middle-and-upper-income households rather than the policy's intended beneficiaries.

The USD 4.5 billion arithmetic

Pakistan's annual petroleum-products import bill ran USD 14–17 billion in recent fiscal years, with transport accounting for roughly 60% of refined-product consumption. Electrifying 30% of the vehicle fleet — heavily weighted toward fuel-intensive two-wheelers and rickshaws — clears out 25–30% of the transport-sector petroleum demand, hence the USD 4.5 billion savings target.

That figure is not abstract: it represents real foreign exchange that today drains out via Saudi Aramco, ADNOC, and Kuwait Petroleum monthly cargoes, and that would instead show up as PKR-denominated electricity demand on K-Electric, LESCO, IESCO, and the other Disco bills.

What it does to the grid

The flip side of fuel savings is incremental grid demand. Two million e-bikes alone would add roughly 1,800–2,200 GWh per year of new residential electricity demand. Manageable in aggregate — but most home charging will concentrate in the 6–11 PM evening window when residential AC loads are already near system peak.

NEPRA has not yet issued residential time-of-use tariffs that could push that load into the overnight off-peak window. Without that lever, EV adoption inflates exactly the most expensive marginal generation on the system — furnace-oil and LNG-fired plants that set the peak-hour price.