The frenzy started on a single street in Lahore, Pakistan, where a half-dozen showrooms sprang up selling the same thing — electric motorcycles — and still couldn’t keep up with demand. As gasoline prices soared this year a seventh store opened, followed by an eighth. Another two are doing business just around the corner.
And that was just the beginning.
Electric motorcycles scarcely existed in Pakistan three years ago. But across the country, new brands are arriving by the week with names like Vlektra and Jolta, from some 84 companies and counting.
They’re a mix of shoestring operations, venture-capital-backed start-ups and preexisting companies that see the potential and are jumping in. Even the Pakistani maker of Massey Ferguson tractors plans to launch an electric motorcycle line.
The surge signals how quickly, and perhaps permanently, people in developing countries are pivoting away from fossil fuels as the war in Iran keeps oil prices high.
“If all these people convert to electric, even 500 companies would not be enough,” said Mumtaz Hussain, the national sales manager for Eveon, which has a showroom on one end of the street, Maulana Shaukat Ali Road, where much of the shopping is happening in Lahore.
Electric motorcycles are a crucial indicator of changes driven by war. In poorer countries, where people are most vulnerable to energy-price shocks, two-wheelers are far more common than cars. Electric models typically cost more to buy than gasoline-powered versions.
But rising gasoline prices have given electrics a big advantage: It’s cheaper to charge a battery than to fill up a fuel tank.
In Vietnam, famous for its motorcycle-swarmed streets, the biggest domestic producer, VinFast, has seen soaring sales. In Kenya, about 25 to 35 percent of new motorcycle sales are electric, said Gagan Gupta, the founder of Spiro, the largest electric vehicle company operating in Africa. He said the energy shock helped “multiply everything by two times.”
In all these places, people in the industry increasingly tout the idea that future generations will never operate a gasoline-powered vehicle. “The demand is effectively open-ended,” said Josh Whale, the founder of Ampersand, an electric-motorcycle company that operates in Kenya and Rwanda.
That is certainly true in Pakistan, where motorbikes make up about 80 percent of vehicles on the road and often count as the most valuable thing a person owns.
In Pakistan, sales of electric two-wheelers rose 173 percent during the first half of the year, according to MotorCycles Data, a market-intelligence firm. It attributed the jump to both the oil price increase and a government subsidy program. Hamza Asad, the director of sales for Evee, the country’s largest electric seller, said that 90,000 electric two-wheelers were sold nationwide between April and June, compared with 112,000 for the entire year in 2025.
About 1.9 million motorbikes, gasoline or otherwise, are purchased in Pakistan in a typical year.
“Trump is the biggest salesman. Salesman of the year,” said Muhammad Salman, the managing director of Yadea Pakistan, which has a showroom on the same street, referring to the increase in demand for gas-free bikes that has followed the president’s decision to attack Iran.
In Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, the proliferation comes from a mix of homegrown ingenuity and Chinese opportunism.
A handful of Pakistani companies use chassis and tires manufactured domestically while relying on batteries and motors from China. But other companies depend on China almost entirely. They import bikes essentially like IKEA furniture, in ready-to-assemble packages that need little more than a logo.
China has a constellation of companies, mostly in the city of Wuxi, that offer these customizable kits. Pakistan, aiming to clear up its polluted skies, applies duties of only 1 percent on such imports.
At a recent trade expo in Lahore, Claire Cheng, the foreign trade manager at Engtian, a Wuxi-based manufacturer of electric-motorcycle kits, asked passers-by: “Are you starting a company?”
She had arrived with a bag of business cards, some candies and plenty of brochures filled with 85 possible motorcycle designs, from Vespa-style city scooters to rugged models with fat tires. “We can provide you with your own brand,” she said.
Lahore has hundreds of electric motorcycle showrooms. But the stores around Maulana Shaukat Ali Road have become the nucleus for the industry, clustered in a middle-class neighborhood among a cake store, a butcher and a Subway sandwich shop.
Among the earliest brands on the street was Metro, whose motorbikes come in the ready-made units from China, said Usman Arif, the chief executive of Arif Motors, which sells the bikes. Soon after came Evee, which opened on a nearby street, and which recently doubled the length of its Lahore assembly line, where parts come from both China and Pakistan.
Mr. Asad, Evee’s director of sales, said his hope is that the company’s name, pronounced “E.V.,” becomes synonymous with the product. “Like Kleenex,” he said.
Then there is Vlektra, which opened its dealership just weeks after the start of the Iran war this year. The company’s origins trace back to New York City, where its founder, Syed Raza Mohsin, had been working in his 30s at a hedge fund and “hanging out with too many old rich people,” he said.
Mr. Mohsin, now 43, remembers looking at Tesla’s soaring sales figures and realizing that his home country would miss out on any E.V. transition that depended on buying $40,000-plus vehicles. So he returned to Pakistan, hired a few people, and tried to figure out if it was possible to make a two-wheeler for around $1,000.
Mr. Mohsin knew his target market. To appeal to buyers, any bike needed to be visually comparable to the de facto national motorcycle of Pakistan, the Honda CD 70. It’s everywhere, and it has scarcely changed its appearance in 40 years. The CD 70 doesn’t even have a fuel gauge.
But it is a workhorse. It can churn through shin-high monsoon floodwaters or power up rural roads. And it famously holds its resale value.
“We wanted some sense of familiarity,” said Mr. Mohsin, who ultimately rolled out a model with a Honda-like profile and similar 17-inch rims. It even has a familiar but purely decorative cap for a nonexistent fuel tank.
Not everything went smoothly. Vlektra has tried to source parts domestically, but five years after its first sale, its bikes, even those lined up in the showroom, don’t always have consistent details in the metal work.
And this spring, the company kept taking orders but couldn’t keep pace with deliveries. Buyers fired off negative reviews about three-month wait times. “It’s not a pretty sight, and I am not proud of it,” Mr. Mohsin said.
Still, on a recent Wednesday night along Maulana Shaukat Ali Road, Vlektra had the busiest store. One of the shoppers was Haider Ali Khan, who said he was spending 8 percent of his salary on fuel and had become convinced the “next age is electric.” Another man, Saad Bin Arif, said he’d come from 200 miles away — not to buy a bike, but to inquire about opening a dealership of his own.
And yes, the store has attracted Honda devotees.
Abdul Rafay said he had never considered himself an “electric guy.” He’d been driving his Honda CD 70 for 10 years, nearly 100,000 miles, and called it “the best beauty you have in Pakistan.” But he commuted more than 40 miles per day for his software job. He liked the look of the Vlektra. And the math had become impossible to ignore.
“If I can save a few rupees,” he said, “I’ll do it.”
Pakistan has good reasons to support the changes. Petroleum products account for about 30 percent of imports, meaning that higher oil prices drain the foreign currency supply and can spark inflation.
Pakistan also ranks as the country with the world’s worst air quality. One study in Lahore, the nation’s second-largest city, found that transportation accounts for 83 percent of the pollution, and that smog reduces life expectancy by an average of six years. The average vehicle in Pakistan emits about 25 times the emissions, per mile, as the typical vehicle in America.
These motorcycles are “throwing out raw petrol,” said Usman Khan, who helped advise the government on its E.V. policy.
Pakistan is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change because it faces waves of extreme heat and lacks the funds to fully prepare itself. It also is regularly deluged by monsoons that flood the streets of Lahore.
During one of those recent midday deluges, people scrambled for cover, and anybody lucky enough to be indoors stayed put. That included Imran Khalid, a salesman sitting in the showroom of another electric motorcycle company, Hi-Speed. He and the building owner, Zeeshan Bahabur, had no shoppers to tend to, so they poured some tea and gave a confession.
“Actually, we are thinking of launching our own brand, too,” Mr. Bahabur said.
They’d just gotten back from a 25-day trip through China, they said. They’d traveled to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuxi, seeking out halal food, visiting factories and negotiating about prices, powertrains and batteries.
They didn’t yet have a brand name in mind. But they’d decided that even if Pakistan already had 84 electric-motorcycle companies, there would soon be an 85th. “We will be another one,” Mr. Khan said. “Not might be — must be.”
Tung Ngo in Hanoi contributed to this report.