There are 8,582 registered tuk-tuks in Bangkok. As of the end of May this year, 1,056 of them, nationwide, were electric. Hold those two numbers next to each other for a second, because they explain almost everything about what’s actually happening across Southeast Asia right now, and why I think the region’s sudden enthusiasm for cleaner air deserves a more honest reception than it’s getting.
Six countries, in one form or another, are currently trying to get petrol engines out of the places tourists actually walk. Bangkok is consulting on banning them from the royal temple district. Hanoi has already done it, on eleven streets, on weekends. Laos has gone further than either and simply stopped new combustion cars from entering the country at all. Singapore has been quietly building toward this for years and has now put a hard date on the end of the internal combustion engine. Cambodia has scrapped the tax that made electric vehicles expensive in the first place. Only Malaysia, as far as I can find, hasn’t moved yet. I think most of this is genuinely good news. I also think almost none of the coverage of it, Asia Unmasked’s own newsletter piece on Bangkok and Hanoi included, has properly sat with the fact that somebody has to actually drive the vehicle that gets banned, and that the gap between 8,582 and 1,056 is exactly the size of the problem nobody’s pricing in.
Start with Bangkok, because it’s the proposal still genuinely up for grabs. The Department of Land Transport is consulting the public until 27 August on banning petrol-powered tuk-tuks from the inner city around Wat Phra Kaew and the royal temples, exempting electric ones outright. If you want to actually weigh in, the department’s own online consultation portal takes submissions directly, and I’d encourage it, because a policy this consequential deserves more input than the handful of stakeholders who usually show up to these things. The department’s director-general, Sorapong Paitoonphong, has been careful to say that reports of an imminent ban are premature, that no regulation has actually gone to government yet, and that conventional vehicles may end up time-restricted rather than banned outright once the consultation closes. That caution is doing a lot of work. There’s a real difference between some tuk-tuks losing part of their working day and the vast majority of Bangkok’s tuk-tuk fleet becoming unusable inside its own most profitable operating zone, and those are very different policies wearing the same headline.
Here’s the thing about Bangkok specifically that makes me want to withhold applause until I see the actual numbers: this city has already promised us a version of this future once, and hasn’t delivered it. Bangkok’s electric bus fleet was supposed to be running by now. It isn’t. The original target, 1,520 electric buses, has slipped repeatedly, and the first meaningful batch, around 500 buses, isn’t expected until September this year at the earliest, with the rest of the fleet not arriving until 2027 through 2029. If you’ve been on Sukhumvit Road any time in the last year, you’ll have seen exactly what I mean: the old diesel and NGV buses are still there, because the electric ones that were meant to replace them mostly aren’t.
And it’s not just tuk-tuks and buses. Bangkok has also been studying a London-style congestion charge for years now, a fee of somewhere between 40 and 50 baht on any vehicle entering the city centre, with the money earmarked to fund a flat 20-baht fare across the electric train network. British transport experts are involved, the final study is due late this year, and officials are floating a PM2.5 reduction of up to 36 per cent as the headline benefit. Residents inside the proposed charging zone have been promised an exemption. It’s a genuinely good idea, in principle. It has also been a genuinely good idea, in principle, since at least 2019, when the first feasibility study on this exact scheme began, and it still hasn’t reached a government decision, let alone a launch date. Add it to the tuk-tuk consultation and the delayed bus fleet, and a pattern starts to look less like bad luck and more like how Bangkok actually operates: announce the ambition early, keep the study running for years, and let the traffic keep moving exactly as it always has. I don’t say any of this to be cynical about the tuk-tuk consultation specifically. I say it because a city with a recent, well-documented track record of announcing an emissions policy years before it can actually fund and deliver the vehicles, or even finish the study, to match it has earned a certain amount of scepticism, and readers planning a trip around what Bangkok’s old city will supposedly look like in a year’s time should factor that scepticism in.
Hanoi is the useful counterpoint, because it’s the one government in this piece that’s actually done the thing rather than merely proposed it. From 1 July, petrol motorbikes and Grab bikes have been barred from eleven streets in the Old Quarter’s Hoan Kiem Ward, weekends and Friday evenings only, in a district where PM2.5 levels run at roughly double the national standard. It’s worth being honest about scale here too: the original plan, ordered by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh back in 2025, was a full 26 square kilometre ban across the entirety of Ring Road 1. What’s actually live is a fraction of that, eleven streets, part-time. Tour operators in the Old Quarter have already switched to electric rentals for those routes, which tells you the market can move faster than the policy when there’s an obvious commercial reason to, and the city’s own longer-term plan extends the restricted zone across Ring Roads 1 and 2 by 2028. Hanoi, in other words, chose to start small and real rather than announce big and slip, which is the opposite of Bangkok’s bus problem, and I think that’s worth more credit than it’s getting.
On eleven of these streets, weekends and Friday evenings now belong to electric wheels only.
Laos didn’t bother with a pilot zone at all. Since 1 June, the government has suspended imports of new petrol and diesel passenger cars outright, nationwide, running through the end of the year, with exemptions only for public transport, construction and specialist vehicles. Pair that with a full excise tax exemption on electric vehicles under $50,000, a requirement that transport companies run at least 10 per cent electric fleets by the end of this year, and a stated national target of 30 per cent of all vehicles being electric by 2030, and you have, on paper, the most aggressive policy in the region. What I find genuinely interesting is how visible this already is on the ground in Vientiane: Kokkok, a local firm better known for running supermarkets around the capital, operates a small fleet of electric tuk-tuks that are easy to spot next to the traditional three-wheelers, modern styling, none of the two-stroke engine note that usually announces a tuk-tuk before you see it. It’s a small thing, one company, one city, but it’s the actual texture of a policy that most coverage of Laos’s import ban has reduced to a single statistic.
Kokkok’s electric tuk-tuks are already a familiar sight on Vientiane’s streets
Singapore has been playing a longer, quieter game than either. Diesel car and taxi registrations ended entirely from January 2025. Every new car registered from 2030 has to be a cleaner-energy model. And there’s a full internal combustion phase-out vision for 2040, which, if it holds, makes Singapore’s timeline the most decisive in Southeast Asia even though it’s rarely framed that way in the regional coverage, probably because it lacks the dramatic “ban” headline that Bangkok and Hanoi generate. Singapore has also started enforcing this at its own border: from 1 April this year, foreign commercial diesel vehicles that exceed a smoke-emissions threshold are turned back at the land crossing with Malaysia rather than waved through. That’s a genuinely unusual step, a country policing another country’s vehicle emissions standards at the point of entry, and it says something about how seriously Singapore is treating this that I haven’t seen much acknowledged elsewhere.
Cambodia sits at the opposite end of the same graph. The government scrapped import taxes on electric vehicles and related equipment from 1 April this year, a real, meaningful policy change, the kind of thing that should move the needle on adoption. And yet, as of the most recent figures, only 14,534 of Cambodia’s 8.3 million registered vehicles are electric. That’s roughly 0.17 per cent. The country’s own long-term target is 40 per cent of cars being electric by 2050, a quarter of a century from now, which tells you honestly where Cambodia currently sits on this journey: ambition stated, incentive removed, adoption still barely visible. I don’t think that’s a criticism exactly, more a useful corrective to the idea that a tax change alone rewires a country’s vehicle fleet. It doesn’t. It takes time, infrastructure, and enough second-hand electric vehicles filtering down in price that ordinary Cambodians can actually afford one, none of which happens on the timeline of a press release.
And Malaysia, as far as I can establish, simply hasn’t moved on any of this yet. I looked for a genuine current policy comparable to what’s happening in its neighbours and found nothing beyond recycled “Visit Malaysia 2026” sustainability messaging with no actual regulatory teeth behind it. That’s worth noting precisely because it’s the exception. Five of the six countries covered here are doing something concrete. Malaysia, currently, is not, and I’d rather say that plainly than pad the piece with a policy that doesn’t exist.
So where does that leave the actual question I opened with, the one about who pays for all of this? I think the honest answer is: mostly the people who can least afford to. A Bangkok tuk-tuk driver operating a forty-year-old petrol vehicle isn’t choosing to pollute out of indifference, he’s operating the only asset he owns, usually one that took years to pay off, in a city that is now, gradually and with genuinely good intentions, making that asset worthless inside its most valuable working radius. The same is broadly true of Hanoi’s motorbike-taxi drivers and Vientiane’s older tuk-tuk operators. None of the five governments moving on this issue have, as far as I can find, paired their vehicle restrictions with anything resembling a serious buyback, retraining, or subsidised-finance scheme for the drivers being displaced. Singapore can afford to legislate its way to 2040 because Singapore, uniquely in this list, has both the wealth and the existing public transport network to absorb the transition without leaving individual livelihoods stranded. Bangkok, Hanoi, Vientiane and Phnom Penh do not have that luxury, and policies copied from a rich city-state onto a poorer one without the accompanying social infrastructure tend to land exactly where you’d expect: on the driver, not the policymaker.
None of this means I think these policies are wrong. Southeast Asia’s tourist-dense old quarters are genuinely, measurably unpleasant to walk through on a hot afternoon with two-stroke engines idling every few metres, and the health case for cutting that exposure, for visitors and residents alike, is not remotely in question. What I’d actually like to see, and what I think Asia Unmasked readers deserve to know before they book anything around these changing rules, is less enthusiasm for the announcement and more scrutiny of the follow-through: does the electric alternative actually exist at a price the current operator can reach, is there a transition scheme attached to the ban, and has the government in question already shown, as Bangkok has with its buses, that it can slip a delivery date by years without consequence. Ask those three questions of any “city bans petrol vehicles” headline you read for the rest of this year, this one included, and you’ll get a much more honest picture than the press release alone will give you. The engines are going quiet across this region, city by city. Whether that quiet was paid for fairly is still, in every case but one, an open question.
Related reading: Bangkok has been trying the gentler version of this shift for a while now too, see our earlier piece on the city’s 6,000-bicycle bike-sharing rollout.
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