Banning gas motorbikes in Vietnam is a silly move

There are better ways of encouraging the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Last month, the Vietnamese authorities announced that gas-powered motorcycles and scooters will be banned from central Hanoi starting in July 2026. From January 2028, this ban could be extended nationwide (one imagines to most cities) and, according to some reports, could be expanded to include petrol or diesel cars. The intention behind this move is sound: to get people to purchase electric motorbikes and scooters to reduce citywide pollution and the overall environmental costs of petrol-spewing vehicles. But an outright ban is a blunt force approach.

This isn’t so much about the timeframe, despite some commentators claiming that 12 months is far too little time to make such a transition, since the vast majority of Hanoi’s 8 million residents currently drive gas motorbikes. A 2022 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation found that motorbikes and scooters account for 73 percent of Hanoi residents’ transportation needs. However, I’m not so sure a short timeframe is wrong. After all, if you want to outlaw something, it makes sense for the ban to be relatively immediate, not in five or ten years. Protracted bans tend to disinhibit first movers. If Hanoi’s authorities said it would come into effect in 2030, then the average motorist would be wise to wait. It’s most probable that, in five years, electric motorbikes will be cheaper and more readily available, the infrastructure needed to support them will be far more extensive and convenient, and there might be a major revolution in battery technology that means an electric vehicle bought now could be obsolete compared to what’s on offer in a few years.

The reason an outright ban is foolhardy is that it will maximize possible downsides. For starters, the communist authorities haven’t got a good track record when it comes to enforcing transport bans. Any luck with stopping motorists from parking anywhere they want on the pavement? But suppose that the July 2026 deadline comes along and most of Hanoi’s motorbike users haven’t ditched their gas-powered machines. What then?

Option one: the authorities follow through with the ban, in which case the livelihoods of millions of people will be impacted, and the city authorities will face a host of new problems to contend with. (Some of those problems will certainly have downstream effects on Vietnam’s broader environmental goals, thus undermining the entire point of the ban.) Option two: the authorities postpone the deadline, in which case most people will conclude that the intended goal of the ban wasn’t very important (weakening the environmental message) and that the authorities will delay again if most people still haven’t transitioned to electric vehicles by the time of the new deadline.

Far more effective is to try to influence habits and social copying. With limited funds, every city in Vietnam could soon be equipped with simple pavement stations where only electric bicycles and motorbikes can be parked. With a little more money (but not a fortune), solar panels could be installed at each of these stations, allowing people to charge their electric bikes for free. This would have three benefits. First, you’d create spaces where electric bikes can be parked, rather than drivers just leaving their motorbikes anywhere on the pavement, as currently happens. Importantly, it would make the transition to electric vehicles an integral part of improving the city’s tidiness, making it as much about social order as environmentalism. (“Nice neighbors drive electric”).

Second, by investing in the infrastructure needed to support electric vehicles, it would incentivize first movers. Most people simply won’t make the change if it’s a headache to charge your vehicle, such as by having to bring your bike indoors. People are used to gas-powered motorbikes (it’s a habit). They’re not going to adopt a new habit if the old one is far more convenient.

Third, and more importantly, it would make driving an electric motorbike effectively free after the point of purchase, a great selling point for the transition. I’m told that VinFast’s electric bikes range from $600 to $2,600. The national company has recently started offering some good incentives to people to purchase electric bikes, such as subsidizing the registration fee of an electric bike (5 percent of its value) and free charging until 2027.

Additionally, you could prohibit gas-powered motorbikes from parking in most areas of the city and set up a few parking lots for them at inconvenient locations. If a driver of a gas-powered bike wanted to deliver goods, commute for work, or meet friends at a particular restaurant or bar, the fact that they’d have to park so far away from the busiest locations would make it a massive inconvenience for themselves and for others. In other words, you make the transition to electric vehicles a way of avoiding social embarrassment. Who wants to go on a date with someone who has to park 20 minutes away and walk?

This could be followed up with another touch of negative reinforcement. Why do people brush their teeth? Everyone says dental hygiene; it’s really because you don’t want to offend friends or the opposite sex with stinky breath. If Hanoi wanted to get creative, it’d ignore messaging about pollution and environmentalism and, instead, hire a bunch of models and run a publicity campaign claiming that people who drive gas-powered motorbikes are dirtier and smellier than those who drive electric bikes. Get a few influencers involved in this, too, and you’re on your way to social stigmatization, one of the easiest ways to effect change.

Having said all of this, one must remember a major unintended consequence of the electrification of vehicles that few people consider: it will destroy the repair and servicing sector. Instead of dozens of complex parts found in the internal combustion engine, there are effectively just two or three in an electric vehicle. For drivers, this is fantastic; for mechanics, it’s an existential crisis. My guess is that tens of thousands of people currently earn a living in Vietnam by making minor repairs to tens of millions of gas-engine motorbikes. By next July, most of these mechanics in Hanoi could be out of a job.

One solution, which would also massively increase uptake in electrification, would be if local government subsidized people to convert their existing gas-powered motorbikes into electric ones. A half-hour spent on YouTube suggests that this isn’t such a complicated process, and I’m sure that Vietnam’s ingenious mechanics could quickly turn their hands to this. Doing so would provide mechanics with employment, meaning that the Hanoi (and other city) authorities don’t have to cope with thousands of unemployed and essentially skill-less residents in a year’s time. It would also make the transition to electric fantastically cheaper for most people, since the cost of converting an existing machine is significantly lower than buying a new electric vehicle. And not forcing millions of people to buy new machines reduces nationwide consumption of metals, plastics, and other materials, thereby also supporting the country’s environmental goals. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be a move supported by VinFast and the Communist Party’s growth-at-any-cost apparatchiks.

By David Hutt – The Diplomat – August 11, 2025