HCMC Orders 3,000 Battery Swap Stations in 20 Days. Can It Deliver?
Vietnam's e-motorbike sales are booming, but charging infrastructure can't keep up. Regulations, permits, and the power grid are all part of the problem.
[HCMC Orders 3,000 Battery Swap Stations in 20 Days. Can It Deliver?]
Ho Chi Minh City's Department of Construction just issued an urgent directive: install 3,000 electric motorbike battery swap cabinets across the city by April 20.
Only 411 are operational so far.
▍ Bikes Are Selling Faster Than Stations Go Up
VinFast sold over 400,000 electric motorbikes in 2025, five times the year before. The entry-level Evo series alone moved more than 250,000 units. Yadea, Dat Bike, and Pega are all pushing new models too.
HCMC now has over 100,000 electric motorbikes but only about 300 public fast-charging stations. The city's target: 3,000 swap cabinets and 60 charging stations by April 20, scaling to 20,000 cabinets and 100 stations by year-end.
The actual progress: 300 locations have been licensed for 850 cabinets, but only 173 locations with 411 cabinets are wired up and running.
▍ How Battery Swapping Works
The concept is similar to Taiwan's Gogoro system. Cabinets are installed mainly on sidewalks and next to streetlight poles, with some placed at bus stops, parking lots, and industrial zones.
A rider pulls a drained battery from the scooter trunk, slots it into a cabinet, and gets a fully charged one in seconds. Each battery is 1.5 kWh with LFP chemistry, good for about 85 kilometers. A single swap costs 9,000 VND.
V-Green, VinFast's infrastructure arm, is the largest swap network operator with about 4,500 stations nationwide as of early 2026. It aims to reach 150,000 by 2028. Another operator, Great Wealth, is building out in HCMC with plans to support Honda, Yadea, and Yamaha models.
▍ Why It's Taking So Long
On paper, the barrier is low. If no excavation is needed, operators don't even need a construction permit. In practice, the rollout is stuck on three fronts.
The first is regulation. Vietnam still has no unified national standard for charging technology. Each manufacturer uses its own specs. HCMC added its own rule: swap cabinets on public sidewalks must support multiple brands or commit to open connection protocols. But V-Green runs on VinFast's proprietary format, which isn't compatible with other brands. The two sides haven't aligned yet.
The second is the permit process. Some companies rushed to install cabinets before getting sidewalk-use approval and were ordered to remove them in March. Others had incomplete applications bounced back repeatedly. The technical requirements are demanding: IP65 waterproofing, fire safety certification, at least 500-meter spacing between units, and a minimum 1.5 meters of clear pedestrian passage.
The third problem is more fundamental: the power grid. Residential transformers weren't designed for the load of mass simultaneous EV charging. According to The Leader, Hanoi's Ring Road 1 area sees nearly a million vehicle trips daily but has only about 115 charging locations. Even if swap cabinets go up, whether the electrical supply behind them can hold is a separate question.
The government has set an aggressive timeline. The supporting standards, permit processes, and grid capacity are all still catching up.
▍ Policy Pressure Is Building
HCMC isn't alone.
Hanoi has announced a pilot low-emission zone in 9 wards within Ring Road 1 starting July 1, restricting gasoline motorbikes during certain hours. The zone expands to all of Ring Road 1 plus parts of Ring Road 2 in 2028.
HCMC's target is to convert all 400,000 delivery and ride-hailing motorbikes to electric by 2029. By 2030, the city expects to need more than 25,000 public swap cabinets and charging stations.
After April 20, the number of cabinets actually installed will be the first real test of whether this push is working.
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