Here is a number that changes how you think about cars in Bangladesh: 89 percent.
That's roughly the total tax incidence on an electric car imported into the country today. Bring in a vehicle worth ৳25 lakh and, by the time it clears customs, taxes alone add nearly ৳22 lakh more. The car almost doubles in price before anyone sits in it.
I built a small calculator so you can see this for yourself — move the numbers and watch the cascade. Customs duty, regulatory duty, supplementary duty, VAT, advance tax: each one stacks on top of the last. It isn't one tax. It's a ladder, and every rung compounds on the rungs below it.
For years I've watched people draw the wrong conclusion from this number. They say: electric cars are too expensive for Bangladesh. That's backwards. The car isn't expensive. The import is.
Where you build it is the whole story
Take the same calculator and change one thing — not the vehicle, not the battery, not the buyer — just where the car is put together.
- Imported, fully built: the tax load sits near 89%.
- Assembled here from kits: it falls toward 40%.
- Manufactured here: it approaches single digits.
Nothing about the car changed. The steel is the same, the motor is the same, the person who wants to drive it is the same. The only variable is the country where the work happens. That gap — 89% versus single digits — is not a rounding error. It's the difference between a product most families can't reach and one they can.
The duty structure is a message
It's tempting to read Bangladesh's car duties as hostile. I've come to read them as a signal. The state is, in effect, saying: don't just land finished cars here and mark them up — build them here. The tax code rewards local value addition because local value addition is what the country actually wants. Jobs. Skills. Supply chains. An industrial base that doesn't evaporate the moment a shipment clears the port.
The catch is that responding to that signal is hard. Importing is easy: sign a contract, open a letter of credit, wait for a ship. Building is the opposite of easy. It asks for capital up front, a supply chain you mostly have to assemble yourself, engineers who can solve problems no manual covers, and the patience to get it wrong a few times before you get it right.
But the math doesn't leave much room for debate. If the landed-cost penalty for importing is this steep, then the only durable way to make electric vehicles affordable here is to make them here. Not as a slogan — as arithmetic.
Why I keep coming back to this number
I run this calculation, in one form or another, behind almost every decision I make. It's the reason "just import more" was never going to be the answer, and it's the reason the harder path — building locally — is the one worth taking.
So when someone tells me EVs won't work in Bangladesh because they cost too much, I don't argue. I open the calculator, switch one setting, and let the number do the talking.
Try it yourself: the true cost of importing an EV into Bangladesh →