1. Executive Summary

• Thailand's battery-electric vehicle (BEV) market grew 80% in 2025 to 120,301 units and is on track to exceed 120,000 units again in 2026, taking overall electrified powertrain share (BEV + HEV) above 50% of new light-vehicle registrations in Q1 2026.

• Passenger cars have led the transition, but Thailand's commercial vehicle fleet — roughly 1.7 million units, of which light commercial vehicles (LCVs) make up ~63% — remains under 2% electrified. This is the white space: a 1-million-plus-unit diesel LCV parc serving one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing e-commerce logistics markets.

• The BOI's tax holidays, the EV3.5 purchase-subsidy scheme, a proposed Ministry of Transport programme targeting 300,000 additional EVs on the road, and Thailand's positioning as an ASEAN EV export hub are converging to make commercial-fleet electrification the next leg of the EV story.

• Because fleet and last-mile-delivery vehicles are cost- and cycle-life sensitive, LFP (lithium iron phosphate) chemistry is the default choice for this segment — meaning the incremental demand is a lithium story more than a nickel story.

• Asset-light operating models — Chinese and local fleet operators pairing with OEMs, financiers and telematics platforms to run vehicles-as-a-service rather than own them outright — are emerging as the preferred route to scale, echoing the residual-value and fixed-income structuring seen in early-stage ABS-type vehicle leasing programmes.

• On our estimates (see Section 8), a national-scale commercial-EV rollout of the size being discussed by Thai authorities could pull through on the order of several thousand tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) per year by the end of the decade — a modest figure globally, but a fast-growing and largely un-modelled demand pocket for battery-metal investors tracking Southeast Asian penetration.