KATHMANDU, 23 August 2026 - In 1977, two years after the NADA Automobiles Association of Nepal was formed, Nepal registered 801 new vehicles in the entire year.Today the country has approximately 5.5 million registered vehicles. Motorcycles account for roughly 84 percent of new registrations — a statistic that says more about how ordinary Nepalis actually move than any figure about cars.Between those two numbers sits fifty years that nobody planned.

The scale of what was built is measurable. Over the last five fiscal years Nepal imported automotive goods worth approximately NPR 470 billion and paid roughly NPR 351 billion in customs duties on them. In a single recent fiscal year the sector delivered over NPR 75 billion to the national exchequer. Very few industries in Nepal contribute at that order of magnitude, and almost none of them are discussed as an industry rather than as a consumption habit.

What was built beyond the revenue is harder to count and matters more: dealer networks reaching into every province, a parts and after-market supply chain, trained mechanics and service technicians, auto-finance products that made a vehicle attainable on a salary, motor insurance as a mass-market category, and an advocacy relationship with government on emissions, safety and taxation.

None of it was inevitable. All of it took decades.And in the last few years the sentence changed tense.At the Golden Jubilee Edition, a Made in Nepal / Made for Nepal Pavilion will carry vehicles and automotive products manufactured or assembled within the country. Around eight Nepali manufacturers will exhibit among them producers of electric motorcycles, automotive batteries, lubricants and helmets, including Yatri, Asian Batteries, Kohinoor Plastic Industries, Nepal Lube Oil and Purwanchal Lube Oil, listed here without ranking or preference. 

It is a small share of a floor of two hundred stalls. That is precisely why it deserves saying out loud rather than overstating: Nepal is not a manufacturing country in the automotive sense, and no exhibition can make it one. But a country that manufactured none of its own automotive products for most of NADA’s fifty years now manufactures some of them, and can put them on a table next to the imports.

Alongside the domestic story sits the story of endurance. Brands including Suzuki and Tata have been part of Nepali roads for decades long enough that the same family has, in many cases, bought from the same dealer across three generations. “The message we want to convey is that Nepal is no longer limited to importing automobiles. We are gradually moving towards self-reliance and developing domestic industries.”
 — Surendra Kumar Upreti, President, NADA 
Fifty years ago this association was formed to represent people who brought vehicles into Nepal. It now represents people who bring them in, assemble them, finance them, insure them, service them, supply their parts and, increasingly, make some of them.That is not an anniversary. That is a different country.