Shortly after midnight, when offices, educational institutions are closed, factories have slowed and much of Bangladesh is asleep, electricity demand should normally fall sharply.
But this summer, Power and Energy Minister Iqbal Hasan Mahmud Tuku said, something ‘unusual’ has been happening. Demand has remained close to 18,000 megawatts even after midnight.
The minister identified one main reason. According to him, millions of battery-powered rickshaws and electric three-wheelers plugged into the grid for their nightly recharge.
They are sometimes called “Banglar Tesla” or, more pointedly and sarcastically, the “poor man’s Tesla,” a reference to the electric cars produced by Elon Musk’s company. In Bangladesh, however, the Tesla in question is having three wheels instead of four, a brightly coloured canopy, a locally welded chassis and a bank of lead-acid batteries under its passenger seat.
“There is huge demand of around 18,000 megawatts even after midnight,” Tuku said at an energy discussion organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue on August 13. He attributed a large part of that demand to the enormous number of battery rickshaws and e-bikes being charged at night.
The comment pushed one of Bangladesh’s most ‘contested’ vehicles back into a national debate. This time, however, the argument was not principally about traffic congestion or road accidents. It was about electricity.
Within days, the government announced what could become a significant change in how the vehicles operate. Battery-powered rickshaws are to be brought under a licensing and registration system administered by city corporations and municipalities, and the government is considering requiring their batteries to be charged with solar power.
Vehicles using other sources of electricity could be denied registration or renewal. Owners could also face fines. The proposed rules would require fitness certification from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, or a government polytechnic institute at district level, along with traffic police approval.
It is an ambitious attempt to regulate an industry that Bangladesh allowed to become enormous before deciding precisely what it was.
For nearly two decades, electric rickshaws expanded largely outside the formal transport system. Estimates of their number vary considerably precisely because there has been no comprehensive registry.
In 2024, industry estimates put the fleet at as many as four million vehicles. A CPD study published late last year, citing Bangladesh Road Transport Authority data, put the number of electric three-wheelers nationwide at roughly six million, including about two million in Dhaka.
What is clearer is their economic importance. The CPD study estimated that the sector provides livelihoods to nearly four million drivers and carries around 112 million passenger trips a day.
The vehicles have effectively created a mass electric transport system without a government programme to create one.
Their development was incremental. Early models were often conventional pedal rickshaws fitted with motors and batteries. Workshops then began strengthening frames, widening passenger compartments and experimenting with steering systems, wheels and brakes.
More elaborate electric three-wheelers followed. Many were assembled in small workshops using imported components and designs modified by local mechanics.
By 2024, a workshop on the outskirts of Dhaka could build an electric rickshaw for about 90,000 taka. Mechanics had learned techniques from older manuals, practical experience and Youtube videos. Some locally assembled models could reach 25 kilometres an hour.
That informality helped keep the vehicles affordable. It also produced many of the problems the government is now trying to solve.
Electricity is one of them.
Talking with Daily Waadaa, Shafiqul Alam, lead analyst for Bangladesh energy at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the government’s move toward solar charging was sensible, but the scale of the transition should not be underestimated.
“This is a good initiative, but it definitely needs to be backed by the next steps and an action plan,” Alam told Waadaa. “Because bringing everyone under solar will take considerable time.”
Powering the fleet through solar energy, he said, would ultimately require several thousand megawatts of renewable generation capacity.
The immediate problem is less visible. Many rickshaws are simply charged at drivers’ homes or garages, often overnight. That makes their electricity use difficult to identify in official statistics.
Alam estimated that if Bangladesh has around five million electric rickshaws, charging them could account for roughly 8% to 10% of the country’s annual electricity consumption, though he stressed that the calculation was approximate.
“It is certainly above 5%,” he said.
That estimate is higher than some published calculations. CPD estimated electric three-wheelers consume nearly 5% of Bangladesh’s daily electricity generation, equivalent to roughly 750 megawatts.
It also estimated that Dhaka had more than 48,000 illegal charging points compared with only around 3,300 government-approved stations.
The discrepancy itself illustrates the problem: nobody has a definitive count of the vehicles, and much of their electricity consumption disappears statistically into other categories.
BPDB records,Alam said, substantially understate rickshaw charging because electricity used at home is recorded as household consumption rather than vehicle charging.
He recently called two e-rickshaw users in Jamalpur to ask how they charged their vehicles. Both, he said, plugged them in at home.
A typical vehicle requires roughly five to six kilowatt-hours, sometimes more, for a full charge lasting six to eight hours, according to Mr Alam.
The problem is not new. In 2012, when Dhaka was estimated to have only about 20,000 battery-powered auto-rickshaws, officials were already complaining that many were using electricity through unauthorised connections. At the time, the vehicles occupied an awkward regulatory category: neither clearly motorised nor nonmotorised under existing law.
Fourteen years later, the fleet is counted in millions, but much of the charging system remains informal.
Dedicated charging stations could change that, Alam said.
“No, not at home,” he said when asked where the vehicles should ultimately be charged. “They should be charged at dedicated, designated points, where you have the charging stations.”
Solar-powered stations could address two problems simultaneously: reduce nighttime pressure on the grid and allow utilities to account properly for electricity used by electric transport.
The government has also removed customs duty on charging stations in the latest budget, Alam said, potentially making private investment easier.
“If it can now motivate the private sector and the utilities cooperate properly, sufficient charging stations are possible,” he said. “But it will take time — several years.”
There is another problem underneath the passenger seats.
Most of Bangladesh’s electric rickshaws rely on lead-acid batteries rather than the lithium-ion batteries common in modern electric cars. They are cheaper, but they are heavy, relatively short-lived and can create serious environmental and health hazards when improperly recycled.
Professor Ahmad Kamruzzaman Majumder, chairman of the Center for Atmospheric Pollution Studies at Stamford University Bangladesh, said assessments conducted by his organisation found that some batteries used in the vehicles become unusable within six to nine months.
“The quality of the batteries is extremely poor,” he told Waadaa.
Without a proper recycling and reuse system, he said, the growing fleet could produce a large volume of hazardous battery waste containing lead and acidic materials capable of contaminating soil, water and air.
CPD has identified similar risks. Its study reported more than 1,100 informal battery-recycling sites and cited contamination associated with lead processing.
Alam said Bangladesh would eventually need to move from lead-acid batteries toward lithium-ion or comparable technologies.
“There are challenges, but we need to move towards lithium-ion batteries,” he said. “That would be better, including from an environmental perspective.”
Yet electricity and batteries are only part of the controversy.
For years, the most visible complaint about Banglar Tesla has concerned safety.
The criticism has grounds. Many vehicles were never engineered for motorised travel. A conventional rickshaw frame designed around a human pedalling at modest speed behaves differently after a motor is attached and the vehicle begins travelling at 25 or 30 kilometres an hour.
Braking systems, stability, driver training and passenger protection have frequently failed to keep pace.
Transport experts have long argued that such vehicles should be restricted to neighbourhood and feeder roads rather than major thoroughfares and highways.
Shamsul Hoque, a former director of BUET’s Accident Research Institute, told Waadaa that converted rickshaw chassis were not designed to withstand the higher speeds produced by electric motors.
But the perception that battery rickshaws dominate Bangladesh’s road deaths requires qualification.
During a 15-day Eid travel period in Dhaka in last year [2025], Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity found battery-powered rickshaws were involved in about 15% of 315 recorded accidents.
National road-safety figures show other vehicles, particularly motorcycles, impose a much larger overall toll. The Road Safety Foundation recorded 7,584 road accidents nationwide in 2025, killing 7,359 people and injuring 16,476. Motorcycles were involved in 3,029 accidents — almost 40% of the total — and accounted for more than 36% of road deaths.
The government has already begun trying to address the design problem. In January, it introduced 25 newly designed e-rickshaws in Dhaka on a trial basis. The specifications were developed by BUET and approved by the government.
Officials said more than 12,000 drivers had already received training and another 55,000 had been listed for it.
That approach — standardise the vehicle, train the driver and regulate where it can operate — marks a shift from years of attempted bans.
In 2014, the High Court rejected a petition seeking to legalise e-rickshaws. A decade later, the government again ordered them off Dhaka’s roads, only to reverse course after protests by drivers and owners.
The reversals reflected a practical reality. Bangladesh’s transport system had already absorbed the vehicles. For passengers, they filled gaps left by buses and other public transport, particularly for short journeys through neighbourhoods and secondary roads.
The question facing the government, therefore, is no longer whether Banglar Tesla should exist. It already does, at a scale that makes prohibition difficult.
Professor Majumder said requiring renewable-energy charging could be useful, particularly in a country already facing energy shortages and trying to expand renewable generation. It could reduce unauthorised electricity consumption and encourage investment in urban solar installations.
But he cautioned against treating solar charging as a complete solution.
“If we look only at saving electricity or generating electricity, and use that to legitimise the inclusion of these vehicles in the overall transport sector, there is a risk that, from a broader perspective, our transport sector could move towards a more chaotic situation,” he said.
The vehicles, he argued, require a comprehensive policy covering charging, batteries, recycling, safety and transport planning.
Alam reached a similar conclusion from the energy side. Registration would finally give policymakers something they have never had: a reliable count. That number could then be incorporated into electricity-demand forecasts, charging infrastructure and renewable-energy planning.
“And since the future is electric vehicles,” he said, “we will gradually have to move towards electric vehicles anyway.”
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