Petrol to EV conversion sounds easy. Is it actually safe?

We cannot afford to treat the electrification of the old fleet as a trial-and-error experiment.

The cabinet’s decision on April 5 to make legal arrangements to enable the conversion of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles to Electric Vehicle (EV) marks a turning point in the country’s rapidly progressing EV landscape, finally dismantling the archaic legal barriers of the 1992 Motor Vehicle Act to permit the ICE-to-EV conversion. If we look back at the history in brief and keep aside the first drive-train conversion that happened in 1993, when Bikram Tempo was converted into Safa Tempo, engineers at a private firm, TheeGo, had converted a Daewoo Matiz and presented it in the NADA Auto Show in 2019. Thereafter, institutions like Kathmandu University and the National Innovation Centre have been demonstrating converted vehicles. However, the policy hurdles limited these conversions to demonstration or proof-of-concept only.