Some nights, after fuel and rental, he clears less than Rs500. He has heard about electric bikes. He asks the same question everyone in his position asks: how does one pay an upfront cost for an electric bike?

That question is the crux of Pakistan’s electric motorcycle problem. The economics are not in dispute. An electric motorcycle running on 1.4 kWh of charge per trip costs Rs40 in electricity versus Rs300–325 in petrol for the same 60 km.

Annual operating savings run around Rs70,000 per bike, enough to pay back the price difference in under two years. Pakistan has 30.52 million registered motorcycles, consuming roughly 3.2m metric tonnes of petrol annually, translating to roughly $2.5 billion in import costs from this single vehicle class alone. The arithmetic for switching is overwhelming.

The barrier is not the numbers. It is the sticker price of an entry-level electric bike when the buyer has no savings, no credit history, and no government programme to bridge the gap. What Vietnam did In 2022, Vietnam had a motorcycle fleet problem that looked a lot like Pakistan’s, with 45m registered two-wheelers, a petrol import bill climbing with every crude price cycle, and an economy in which the motorbike was less a transport choice than a survival instrument.

VinFast launched its VF electric scooter at around $500, comparable to an entry-level petrol equivalent. With battery swap stations, every electric bike charged converts an idle capacity payment from a fiscal liability into productive revenue The government simultaneously removed registration tax on electric two-wheelers, mandated that ride-hailing platforms transition their fleets to electric, and provided a targeted purchase subsidy for the first tranche of buyers. Within two years, electric two-wheelers crossed 15 per cent of new sales.

The key difference between Vietnam then and Pakistan now is not technology, cost, or consumer willingness, it is policy execution. The swap model The objection most frequently raised against electric motorcycles in Pakistan is the charging infrastructure. Where do riders charge if they live in a one-room rental with shared wiring?

The answer — operational at scale across Southeast Asia — is the battery-swap station. In Vietnam, Indonesia, and parts of China, riders do not charge batteries, they swap them. A depleted battery is exchanged for a fully charged one at a kiosk the size of a large refrigerator.

The whole process takes 90 seconds. A single swap station serving 200 riders per day costs between $5,000 and $8,000 to set up and occupies less than 50 square feet. This is not a public infrastructure problem requiring government capital.

Rather, it is a franchise opportunity. Indonesia launched a structured battery-swap programme in 2023. Fleet operators, exactly the kind of owner Amjad rents from in Karachi, were offered subsidised electric bikes on the condition that they contracted with swap-station operators for battery supply.

The fleet owner’s fuel cost became a fixed monthly contract instead of a volatile daily exposure to oil prices. His drivers, the Amjads of Jakarta, got predictable costs and zero range anxiety. Pakistan’s food delivery, logistics, and ride-hailing platforms are natural anchors for an identical model.

The surplus nobody is using Pakistan has 46,605 MW of installed generation capacity. Peak summer demand reaches 28,000–30,000 MW. The structural surplus, the capacity for which the country pays around Rs2 trillion in annual capacity charges regardless of whether a single electron is generated, is 16,000-18,000 MW.

At night, between 10PM and 6AM, when industrial demand drops and most of Pakistan sleeps, the available surplus expands to 20,000–25,000 MW. Moreover, during the day, the marginal cost of electricity drops to as low as Rs6 per kWh, given the prevalence of behind-the-meter solar across the country. Electrifying 5m motorcycles by 2028 would add approximately 1TWh to annual electricity demand, representing under 1pc of current national consumption, drawing almost entirely during off-peak hours.

The grid is underutilised; battery charging becomes an optimisation problem, where fleet operators align charging and pricing of battery swaps according to the most favourable rate available. Every electric bike charged converts an idle capacity payment from a fiscal liability into productive revenue for electricity distribution companies while simultaneously displacing imported petrol. In such a scenario, everyone wins, including the grid, the consumer, as well as the balance of payments. Amjad’s answe