When will diesels really be gone?

LTA announced earlier this month that new registration of diesel cars and taxis will cease from 2025. This is to support Singapore's vision for all vehicles to run on cleaner energy by 2040.

According to LTA, diesel cars and taxis have taken up less than one per cent of new registrations since 2021. 

When looking at published LTA stats, the numbers tell that story (though an incomplete one). It's immediately worth pointing out here that LTA does not publish the specific statistics for diesel taxis.

Also, diesel-electric models have been excluded from the data analysis, as they form a tiny fraction of the overall numbers, and LTA has not defined if these models are part of the 2025 deadline (we assume not).

For passenger cars, the percentage of new car registrations of diesel models relative to the total registrations has been falling since 2018:

The 2016/2017 spike was driven largely by diesel BMW models — specifically (and in all likelihood) the 1 Series 116d and 2 Series Gran Tourer 216d models. 

Since then, however, new diesel car registrations have significantly tapered off — due to changing legislation and taxes, as well as evolving market demand. 

Now, if we look at the larger overall car population, and the diesel proportion of it, the trend lines are slightly different.

Taxis

For taxis, the overall diesel population has been falling since 2014, and by quite a remarkable rate (since 2017, between 19 per cent to 35 per cent year on year).

Yes, in that same time, the switch to hybrid taxis has been notable (with year-on-year percentage increases since 2014), but the overall taxi population has also fallen year on year since 2015. This is an indication of the shrinking taxi market as a whole.

As of 2023, the diesel taxi populations stands at a relatively tiny 2,860, so in a relatively short time we should expect diesel taxis to more or less be completely phased out. 

Passenger Cars

For passenger cars, it's a different story. In fact, the diesel car population has been growing since 2014, reaching its peak in 2022.

In that same time, the overall car population has also been growing ever so slightly since 2017. Consequently, the diesel population of passenger cars since 2018 constitutes around 2.8 per cent of the overall car population. 

So, what effect will this 2025 deadline have?

The more cynical among us may say that the impact is insignificant. The diesel taxi population is already so small, and the diesel car population in 2023 makes up just 2.8 per cent of all passenger cars on the road.

Even prior to this new mandate, few distributors were bringing in new diesel models, so the choice of a new diesel model already is limited. 

When will diesels be gone? The answer, in all likelihood, is a long, long time more away.

Given that the passenger car diesel population peaked in 2022 (and the typical 10-year COE cycle), it will be a good amount of time before these cars stop plying our roads (not accounting for renewed COEs). We're probably looking at 2030 and after when the diesel car population will dramatically shrink.

As we previously explored, more significant is the commercial vehicle population, where diesel makes up a much more significant percentage.

In 2023, the diesel Goods & Other Vehicles population stood at 128,381, which represents 89.2 per cent of all Goods & Other Vehicles, and actually 13.2 per cent of all vehicles on the road.

And, there has thus far been no clear mandate on the 'greenification' of that particular segment of vehicles.

While there are incentives in place to encourage cleaner vehicles, such as the Commercial Vehicles Emissions Scheme and Early Turnover Scheme that have been extended to March 2025, there have been no hard deadlines set out (unlike for cars and taxis).

Encouragingly, we are seeing the introduction of new electric commercial vehicles to market, and a notable growth in adoption, but as of 2023, the 3,338 examples make up just 2.3 per cent of the total Goods & Other Vehicles population. 

But in another view, this is the first and necessary (albeit small) step in cleaning up our transport ecosystem. Such changes, important and relevant as they may be, will not happen overnight. It will not even happen quickly at all. But each small step is a necessary and incremental progress towards a cleaner future. 

So yes, you can expect that the diesel pumps at petrol stations won't be going anywhere. Barring policy changes or new mandates, diesel vehicles will be on our roads for a long time more. 

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This article was first published in sgCarMart.