Climate plan says bikes burn $6bn to $8bn of fuel. Industry says check it

Pakistan's Climate Prosperity Plan says the country's motorcycles burn $6 billion to $8 billion of fuel a year. Industry figures say that number cannot be right, and the arithmetic is worth following, because policy on fuel levies and electric two-wheelers is being built on top of it.

The number that does not add up

Tauqir Ahmed, a long-serving automotive industry figure and road safety expert, pointed to the State Bank's own trade data for FY26: refined petroleum imports of $6.2 billion and crude oil imports of $6.8 billion.

"It is therefore difficult to reconcile the claim that two-wheelers alone consume USD 6 billion to USD 8 billion worth of fuel," he said.

Put plainly, the plan says motorcycles alone consume roughly as much fuel by value as Pakistan imports in refined petroleum in a year, before you account for a single car, truck, bus, tractor, generator or ship.

The second discrepancy is the fleet size

The Climate Prosperity Plan counts 10 million active motorcycles. The Pakistan Economic Survey published in March 2026 counts 31.9 million registered two-wheelers. Industry estimates put the genuinely active number somewhere between 16 and 18 million.

Those three numbers are not small variations. A fuel-consumption model built on 10 million bikes and one built on 18 million produce completely different answers about how much a conversion subsidy costs, how much fuel an electric two-wheeler programme actually saves, and how much revenue a levy raises.

SM Ishtiaq, chief executive of MSM Engineering, argued the plan should rest on "verified, evidence-based data rather than assumptions or unverified institutional estimates."

Why a Lahore or Karachi rider should care

This is not an academic dispute. Petrol is at Rs 389.14 a litre, and the petroleum levy on it is a central part of every budget argument. A 70cc bike doing 45 km per litre and 800 km a month burns about 18 litres, or Rs 7,005 a month. Work out your own bike's real cost on the fuel cost calculator, and check the notified rate history on the petrol price page.

If the state believes two-wheelers are burning $6 billion to $8 billion of fuel, two-wheelers look like the obvious place to put a levy, a conversion mandate or an import restriction. If the true figure is a fraction of that, the same policy collects less, saves less and hits 18 million households harder than the model predicted.

The industry's warning is that bad input data leads to "misallocation of already scarce national resources" and damages local manufacturing and the jobs attached to it.

What would settle it

Three things. A published methodology for the Climate Prosperity Plan's fuel figure, a reconciliation between the 10 million and 31.9 million fleet counts, and a stated definition of what counts as an active motorcycle. None of those has been provided yet.