Long lines are forming at gas stations in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa due to fuel shortages. shortages and a price peak in the past few months.
But electric vehicle driver Mikial Belayneh avoids them completely.
“I no longer have to queue for petrol on the road,” Belayneh, an Addis resident, told CNN. A full charge of his imported Toyota bZ4X – a popular electric car in the country – “is more than enough for two days.”
Belayneh, charging his car at home, is part of the rapid transition to electric vehicles in Addis Ababa, a fast-growing city in the Horn of Africa that is central to Ethiopia’s goal of lifting millions of people out of poverty.
Alongside the polluting cars and trucks that thunder down the roads, cleaner — and quieter — vehicles are joining the traffic. Electric buses, smaller 15-seater minivans, cars and motorbikes are appearing on the streets of the capital.
There are about 100,000 electric vehicles so far in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government estimates that this number will more than quadruple by 2032. This is largely due to the national government taking the extraordinary step earlier this year to ban the import of all gas powered passenger cars — becoming the first country in the world to do so.
It also effectively lowered customs duties on imported cars: the tax on gasoline vehicles was up to 200% before they were banned, while the import tax for fully assembled electric vehicles is only 15%, the country’s authorities said. ministry of finance.
It’s part of a government-led effort to get more electric cars on the road.
The lower tariffs are also encouraging more local EV production. Hundreds of vehicles were assembled by Ethiopia-based Belayneh Kindie Group using parts imported from China. Besufekad Shewaye, a manager at the company, told CNN that the import tariffs are “close to zero percent” for EV parts assembled in Ethiopia.
“Nowadays, most vehicle owners prefer electric vehicles, especially light vehicles,” Shewaye said. “The demand is increasing day by day.”
A rapid shift from gasoline
Ethiopia is focusing heavily on electric vehicles, partly because fuel imports are expensive and 96% of the country’s electricity comes from clean hydropower – a double win for the country’s finances and for the environment.
“They are truly a clean energy country,” says Jane Akumu, a Kenya-based program officer at the United Nations Environment Programme. “Why import oil when you have local electricity that you can actually use to power your vehicles?”
The government realized the country had an abundant source of renewable energy when it started switching to electric vehicles, said Assefa Hadis Hagos, transportation advisor for the Ethiopian Ministry of Transport and Logistics.
Still, the total ban on the import of petrol-powered cars, passed in January, surprised many in the region. “We didn’t know that the government would fully support a total ban,” Akumu said.
Ethiopia, ruled for years by a one-party authoritarian government, has shown that it can quickly implement environmental policies that would likely take longer in more democratic countries. In the early 2000s, the country quickly moved to ban inefficient and dangerous leaded gasoline.
“Other countries need more consultation and more participation,” said Akumu, who also led efforts to phase out leaded gasoline in Africa.
The number of cars on the road in Ethiopia is still quite low, about 1.2 million in total – or one car per 1,000 people.
In the US, more than 91% of Americans owns at least one car. In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, it is Total 11.8 million carsor about 54 cars per 1,000 people. The Ethiopian government had kept car ownership rates low with dramatically high taxes on gasoline-powered vehicles that cost consumers up to three times the value of imported cars — part of an effort to get more people to use public transportation.
Although the government has reduced or eliminated some taxes on imported electric cars, buying an electric car is still expensive. “In terms of who is buying electric cars, it’s definitely people in the higher income brackets,” said Iman Abubaker, who lives in Ethiopia and works on sustainable transportation for the World Resources Institute, a global nonprofit.
For this reason, Abubaker’s group and others are working to push the Ethiopian government and others on the continent to invest more in electric buses and public transport, so that these efficient vehicles can be used by people of all income levels.
Despite the costs, Ethiopia’s fleet has seen a gradual but sustained increase in the number of EVs replacing internal combustion engine cars. Within two years of the country’s 10-year target of bringing in more than 100,000 EVs — which began in 2022 — EVs already account for nearly 10% of vehicles, according to CleanTechnica.
The Ethiopian government “feels good” about the pace of the transition, Hagos, the transportation adviser, told CNN, adding that the government has a “commitment” to reducing climate and environmental pollution from gasoline-powered cars.
EV buses and boda boda’s
Ethiopia is currently alone in banning imported petrol cars. The country’s ban is “certainly a one-off”, according to Moses Nderitu, the Kenyan managing director of electric bus company BasiGo.
But the growth of electric vehicles on the continent is happening even without such bans. In Nairobi, Kenya, electric motorcycles are seeing staggering growth. Last year, Uber a fleet rolled out of striking yellow motorcycles – known locally as boda bodas.
After the Kenyan government introduced tax incentives, the number of electric motorcycles on the road increased 500% in a year, industry experts told CNN, dropping from a few hundred to about 3,000 bikes on Nairobi’s streets.
That number is still a fraction of the 200,000 bikes on Nairobi’s streets in total, but it has helped reduce noise pollution in parts of the city, said Hezbon Mose, Kenya director of e-bike company Ampersand, which has bike parks in both Kenya and Rwanda.
Stricter measures have been taken in the Ethiopian capital, including the the failure to issue driving licenses for fuel-powered motorcycles, have been implemented by city authorities, who in April approved a timetable for converting gasoline engines to electric-powered models.
Earlier in March, the city introduced its first fleet of electric buses for public transport.
American-style electric public buses – more boring than the colorful, music-playing gas buses runny nose Buses in Kenya — are also increasingly running on the streets of Nairobi.
Both Mose and Nderitu see EVs on the rise on the continent as some countries move away from oil in favor of cheaper electricity. In many countries, much more infrastructure and government subsidies are needed to get more people driving electric.
“I look at electric vehicles the same way we looked at the mobile phone market 30 years ago,” Nderitu told CNN. “When the rest of the world started using mobile phones, there was no infrastructure (in Africa). There was a very small number of people connected to phones. If you look at Nairobi now, you will hardly find anyone without a phone.”
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