It is a Friday night at Woodlands, the long line of cars breathing warm exhaust into the dark, and somewhere in that queue is a kabayan who moved to Johor Bahru because a room there costs a third of what the same room costs in Singapore. He drives his Malaysian-plated car across for his shifts, the way thousands of us now cross for work, for the weekend grocery run, for a Sunday with the kids at a JB mall. From 6 October, that crossing comes with one more box to tick, and it is the kind of box that, left empty, sends you back the way you came.
The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) has tied the Vehicle Entry Permit to the SG Arrival Card. If you drive a foreign-registered car, meaning a Malaysian plate, into Singapore through Woodlands or Tuas, the arrival card system will check whether your vehicle holds a valid VEP at the moment you submit the form. No valid permit, no completed submission. ICA has said it will turn cars without a valid VEP back to Malaysia at the checkpoint. The rule starts with cars, and ICA will widen it to other vehicle types at the land borders later.
If you already take the bus or the train across, none of this touches you. This is a rule for the driver, and for the family in the back seat counting on that driver to have sorted the paperwork before payday traffic swallows the causeway.
A VEP, and whether you already carry one
The Vehicle Entry Permit is the permission a foreign-registered vehicle needs to stay in Singapore, whether or not you ever park it and walk. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) runs the scheme, and it is not new. The change on 6 October is that ICA now uses the arrival card as the gate: in the past a driver might have crossed and sorted the permit after the fact, and now the form in your phone stops you before you reach the booth.
So the honest first question is whether your Malaysian car is set up at all. To enter Singapore you need three things in place, per LTA. You need a valid Autopass Card, which is the stored-value card that pays your tolls and fees at the checkpoint and holds a maximum of S$500. You need valid Singapore motor insurance that covers the whole time your car sits on this side, written to meet the Motor Vehicles (Third-Party Risks and Compensation) Act. And you need the VEP itself, which LTA issues once your insurance and vehicle details check out. LTA asks drivers who are not using a carnet to apply through its online form at least a month before the trip, so a Monday-morning scramble is the one thing you cannot afford here.
If you drive a Malaysian car into Singapore
Picture the worst version of 6 October. A kabayan finishes a night shift in JB, loads two sleepy children for a day out in Singapore, reaches the arrival card on her phone in the queue, and the submission will not go through because the VEP lapsed when the insurance renewal slipped her mind. ICA's own line is that the car gets turned back. That is a wasted morning, a tank of petrol, and two disappointed kids, for a permit she could have fixed from her kitchen table a week earlier.
The fix is to treat the VEP, the Autopass Card and the Singapore insurance as one set, renewed together, checked before every stretch of regular crossing. Put the renewal dates in your phone the way you guard your work pass expiry. If you share or borrow a car, the permit follows the vehicle, so confirm the owner has kept it live rather than assuming a plate you have driven for months is still covered.
If you drive a Singapore car into JB, this is your other VEP
Plenty of us cross the other way, a Singapore-plated car heading to Johor for cheaper groceries, a haircut, a tank of petrol. That trip has carried its own VEP rule since the middle of 2025. Malaysia requires Singapore-registered vehicles to run an activated VEP-RFID tag, and Transport Minister Anthony Loke has said drivers caught without one face a RM300 compound. The two permits are separate systems for two different governments, so a family that drives both ways in the same week needs both sorted: the Malaysian VEP for the car going north, and from 6 October the Singapore VEP for the car coming south.
