8.18 million. That is how many cars, pickups and vans in Thailand are at least ten years old, on Department of Land Transport figures cited in the proposal. The Excise Department wants to retire 150,000 of them. The country’s certified dismantling yards can take roughly 50,000 vehicles a year.
The trade-in scheme sent to the Finance Ministry in early November is specific about both money and gates. It asks for a 6 billion baht loan under the government’s 2026 borrowing programme, offers 40,000 baht per vehicle, targets 150,000 units and starts spending in January 2027. The old vehicle must have been registered before 2012 and be a private car, a passenger vehicle seating more than seven, or a privately registered goods vehicle, with annual tax paid, engine and chassis numbers legible, and no outstanding finance or seizure order. Applicants must be Thai nationals aged 20 or over, one vehicle each. The money is applied as a deposit or an immediate price cut rather than paid in cash.
The replacement carries harder conditions. It must be built in Thailand, meet Euro 5 or Euro 6, emit no more than 185 g of CO2 per kilometre, and satisfy the B20 or electrified technology criteria. Buyers of electrified pickups can use a Government Savings Bank soft loan capped at 5% a year. None of this is approved yet: the 6 billion baht has to clear the borrowing plan, and the subsidy split, the manufacturers’ matching discount and the eligibility rules all await a committee decision.
Fifty Thousand Slots for 150,000 Cars
The department’s own arithmetic makes the bottleneck visible. Replacing 150,000 vehicles cuts at least 310,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, lowers PM2.5 and NOx from those vehicles by 30% or more, and generates at least 82.5 billion baht in domestic pickup sales. The constraint sits at the end of the chain: certified dismantlers can process about 50,000 vehicles annually, so 150,000 cars is a three-year queue.
That shapes what the policy really is – a split rather than a sweep. The 150,000 that reach a yard get money toward a new truck. The remaining 8 million keep running, and their fate is decided by inspection lanes, in-use limits and local access rules, not by a purchase subsidy. Thailand’s in-use diesel test still leans on free-acceleration smoke opacity, and a Euro 5 pickup and a 2012 diesel differ by an order of magnitude in particulate output. A test lane alone will not close that gap.
So two levers remain: replace some, retrofit others. The truck exhaust purifiers and pickup purifiers built by AIFILTECH follow the second path – coaxial replacement at the original silencer position, washable metal elements that do not depend on exhaust temperature, so smoke stays controlled through the idling and stop-start duty that dominates city pickups. How many vehicles a subsidy reaches is set by dismantling capacity. How many a retrofit programme reaches is set by budget. Different ledgers.
