Driven by Policy

Petrol has been Singapore's default for decades. But in 2021, the government began aggressively reorienting the market toward electric vehicles — through a combination of enhanced road tax rebates, the EV Early Adoption Incentive (EEAI), and expanded charging infrastructure grants.

The effects were near-immediate. EV registrations, previously negligible, began climbing steeply from 2022 onward. The chart on the right tracks the annual registrations for EV and ICE cars from 2015-2025.

Lets take a look at the cost of ownership for both ICE and EV vehicles in Singapore at the major turning points in this graph.

In a country where car ownership is a luxury, price is the ultimate lever. Aggressive subsidies have made the EV transition inevitable, incentivizing drivers to switch faster than the island-wide charging network can even be completed.

In other words, the policy didn't just grow the EV market — it shaped which segment of it grew fastest.

Buying a new ride is only half the equation.

For hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans who already owned a vehicle, a different clock is ticking - the Certificate of Entitlement. After 10 years, they face a pivotal question, whether their vehicle is still worth to pay the CoE Revalidation cost, or they walk away and re-enter the market for a new one?

That decision is anchored by one number: the Prevailing Quota Premium, or PQP.

When PQP is high, renewal becomes expensive — often exceeding the market value of the car itself. Owners might opt to decommission and exit, or re-enter as new buyers. When PQP dips, the math flips: renewing is cheaper than replacing.

This is effectively seen in car ownerships. The graphs of Category A and Category B, which are the categories of CoE for cars, depict increasing renewals when PQP was at fairly low points and low renewals count when PQP was high. In Category B, however, more owners chose to renew for the longer term instead of only 5 years.

On the other hand, the same cannot be said with the other categories.

Category C is for goods vehicle and bus. The ratio between decommissioning and revalidation in this category constantly changed in 10 years, but one can see that within this period, 5-years revalidation has been a popular option.

In plain sight, holders of Category D CoE also didn't seem to be budged by the rise and fall of PQP. Deregistrations dominated, but renewals levels were quite steady. In many quarters, more owners even opted to renew their motorcycle for another 10 years rather than 5 years.

All those subsidy-influenced purchases and PQP-driven re-entries eventually translate into demand for specific cars. And when buyers re-enter the market, they don't all make the same choice.

Brand rankings — which manufacturer sold the most cars each year — capture how policy signals and market shifts crystallise into purchasing decisions at scale.

Nine years. Dozens of brands. Over a million registrations. The animation above compresses Singapore's entire car market from January 2016 to May 2025 into under two minutes. Use the player on the right to pause and scrub through it at any point as you read.

Watch the bars race. Then scroll to understand why they move the way they do.

From 2016 through 2019, the market was calm and predictable. Toyota and Honda traded the top spot back and forth — a rivalry decades in the making, rooted in Southeast Asia's long-standing preference for Japanese reliability and value.

But this stability had a structural ceiling. Singapore's Certificate of Entitlement system issues a fixed monthly quota of permits to own a car. Quota reductions throughout this period kept even the dominant brands below roughly 2,000 monthly registrations, regardless of consumer demand.

In April and May 2020, Singapore entered a strict COVID-19 circuit breaker. Every car dealership was ordered to close. The result is one of the most dramatic single moments in the entire animation — the bars collapse to almost nothing.

In May 2020, just 48 new cars were registered across the entire island. That is a 99.2% drop compared to the same month a year earlier.

When dealerships reopened, volumes recovered — but never fully. A global semiconductor chip shortage, which ran from 2020 through 2023, disrupted automotive production worldwide, causing an estimated 9.5 million units of lost output in 2021 alone. Singapore's supply-constrained market felt this acutely.

Then, around August 2021, something new appears in the chart: Tesla. The Model Y's first Singapore deliveries coincided precisely with the launch of the EV Early Adoption Incentive — a government rebate of up to S$45,000 on electric vehicles. A new era had quietly begun.

BYD entered Singapore's market in 2022. By 2024, it had overtaken Toyota to become the island's best-selling car brand — the first time in decades that a non-Japanese manufacturer had led the market.

Its rise was not accidental. Aggressive pricing, a diverse all-electric lineup, and the tailwind of Singapore's Green Plan 2030 — which targets all new car registrations to be cleaner-energy models by 2030 — made BYD the direct beneficiary of the same policy environment that brought Tesla in three years earlier.

By May 2025, the final frame tells a story that would have been unrecognisable in 2016. BYD leads with 825 registrations. Toyota follows at 668. A second Chinese brand — GAC — has appeared in the top ten.

Japanese brands, which collectively held over 50% of the market in 2019, had fallen to roughly 35% by 2025. The same policy levers that once entrenched their dominance — COE quotas, rebate structures, Green Plan targets — have now systematically redirected demand toward an entirely different set of winners.

Rankings don't just reflect brand preference. They encode the combined effect of COE category distribution, EV readiness, model pricing relative to PQP-influenced budgets, and the timing of new model launches against quota cycles.

A brand's rise or fall is rarely a story about the cars alone.