Carro, Asia Pacific’s leading online automotive marketplace, sees the rise of Chinese electric vehicles (EV) in Southeast Asia as a tailwind for its used-car business, a spokesperson at Carro said to TNGlobal. Carro also defended its S$450 million ($352 million) securitisation of Singapore car loans against risks, which contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

Chinese EV brands are flooding into Southeast Asia and reshaping both new and used markets. How does the rise of EVs change the economics of a used-car business? Is it a challenge or an opportunity for Carro?

Carro has been selling new cars since 2025 and today, it has authorised dealers of brands such as Dongfeng, Zeekr, Omoda Jaecoo, JMEV, Wuling, and a few more brands across Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.  For every EV car that is sold, there is trade-in of vehicles, whether traditional ICE or EVs.

Naturally, Carro also starts seeing even more used EVs make its way into the used car market. Years of marketplace experience and expertise in EV aftersales continues to keep Carro competitive within this space. Generally, Carro is a marketplace business. If the market adopts more EVs, Carro will have more EVs on its platform.

Securitising car loans into an institutional asset class echoes the financial engineering that partly led to the 2008 financial crisis, where loan quality got buried under the structure. What are your expectations?

Carro welcomes the focus on risk management, but the comparison to 2008 misunderstands both the asset class and the mechanics of this facility. Securitising auto loans is a mainstream, crisis-tested financing mechanism widely utilized by global auto manufacturers, commercial banks, and institutional investors in mature financial markets, such as the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.

It is a standard tool for capital efficiency and liquidity. Unlike the opaque, uncollateralized subprime mortgage products of 2008, Carro facility is backed by high-performing and vehicle-secured receivables in Singapore.

Singapore’s auto financing market operates under MAS loan-to-value caps and is underpinned by the intrinsic, government-backed value of the Certificate of Entitlement (COE) system. Far from hiding loan quality under complex structures, Carro’s data-driven underwriting provides granular and transparent visibility into portfolio performance.

Carro continues to hold junior tranche and will take first loss, hence Carro is naturally aligned to minimize losses and will continue to originate high-quality loans.

Car marketplace Carro sets up S$450M car-loan securitisation, first in Singapore