Electric vehicles cars are coming to Vietnam!

I love me an exclamation point, if you haven’t learned, dear readers. But this post actually makes me excited. There are going to be electric buses in Vietnam! Also cars! And scooters! I am excited about this, because I truly believe it is the future. Even the WSJ car reviewer agrees with me. In last 2018, he said that he has bought his last internal combustion engine, and his next car (in a few years) will be an electric vehicle.

So the news is that a subsidiary of VinGroup (the company making the first Vietnamese cell phone) will also manufacture electric buses and electric cars. The buses make me most excited, because it just seems like such a straightforward idea. The routes are predetermined. They aren’t that long. Battery life is important but can easily be managed. But the benefits are big: It reduces pollution, plus electric motors are less complex, meaning there is less maintenance. If the economics aren’t too bad, then it makes perfect sense. And once you add in pollution, even if the costs are tilted against EVs, it would still make sense.

“VinBus will start transport services with up to 3,000 e-buses in five major cities from March 2020…you may expect to see electric buses in the following five cities in Vietnam: Hanoi, Hai Phong, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City, and Can Tho from 2020.”

SOURCE: EV-VOLUMES.COM.

Hanoi has a bus system with more than 100 routes, and probably has around 400 buses, based on what I have seen for HCMC. That’s a total of 1,000 buses at most for both cities. Then adding in Hai Phong, Da Nang and Can Tho, that means a wholesale replacement of buses in major metropolitan areas in Vietnam.

I haven’t been able to find any good information on ridership, but it appears to be not great. Just like everywhere, buses are not a high-prestige form of transport. And the ubiquity of scooters probably doesn’t help, since they are relatively inexpensive travel options. But overall this should still be a net positive.

NORWAY EV SALES AE ALMOST HALF OF ALL VEHICLE SALES SOURCE: STATISTA

On the car front, this has been reported earlier: VinFast announced it would manufacture three new cars in Vietnam, two would be internal combustion and one would be electric.

Electric vehicle sales are booming all over the world, up 64% in the past year. Norway is very close to surpassing the tipping point – in 2018 49.1% of all cars sold were electric. That is by far the best number by country, but there are other important data points. Overall vehicle sales fell 3% in China last year, except for electric vehicles, which grew 78%.

NOTE: THESE PRICES ARE AS OF MAY 6. THE COUNTRIES WITH * HAVE PRICES UPDATED WEEKLY. THE REST ARE UPDATED MONTHLY. SOURCE: GLOBALPETROLPRICES.COM

So there is real room for EVs in Vietnam. Especially because gasoline prices aren’t cheap. In May, they were $0.96 per liter, higher than the US ($0.85) and almost double Malaysia. Actually, throughout southeast Asia, prices are high, except for Malaysia and Indonesia (both of which export oil).

Relatively high gas prices help push the adoption of EVs, because the economic tradeoff is better. So let’s hope the country continues to raise prices on gasoline, and offers subsidies for EVs. It would be good for exports/imports, and it would be good for the environment.

I wrote about the automobile market in detail back on February 26, 2019. Scroll down to read it.