🚁 Heli view: Burkina Faso is making EVs? What the ****

Less than two weeks ago, Burkina Faso unveiled its first locally-made electric vehicle along with public EV charging stations. 

• The car (above) is fully electric, charges in 30 minutes and has a range of 330 km. 

• Made by Burkinabe engineers at local automaker Itaoua, it serves a market where less than 1,000 new vehicles are sold annually. 

For real: Burkina Faso, which has a GDP of $20 billion and 23 million citizens, is the latest in a growing list of African countries that are making EVs. 

• The majority of vehicles on the continent are still being imported. 

• But every week a new vehicle plant seems to be announced.

Going big: African EV maker Spiro announced a plan on Monday to make 100,000 motorbikes annually in Nigeria starting this year.

• Rahul Gaur, Spiro’s director for West Africa, said, “This will also include localising the manufacturing of three-wheelers and batteries.”

• The previous week the company announced interest-free financing for Kenyan customers as well as an expansion to India. 

Market size: More than one hundred separate companies form what is starting to look like a pan-continental vehicle industry. 

• The African EV market is estimated to reach sales above $17 billion this year, with a projected annual growth rate of more than 10% over the next five years.

Growing diversity: Even more surprising than the size of the market is its geographic spread, growing vehicle types and increasing production sophistication.

Second-class: Vehicle production in Africa has long been looked down on as mere assembly of parts. And that’s still a lot of what happens now, though at escalating scale.

• Kenyan EV maker Roam plans to reach an annual production capacity of 50,000 locally designed and assembled electric motorcycles and buses. 

• More than 20 African countries are now assembling locally, fuelled by tax incentives.

Open eyes: Actual manufacturing is however taking hold as well on the continent.

• South African-based MellowVans manufactured the world’s first electric tricycle to be declared road legal in Europe.

• Innoson in Nigeria has unveiled a locally produced electric vehicle line-up.

• In any case, the assembly vs manufacturing distinction is increasingly fluid globally. Nobody makes all their own parts. Everyone assembles to some extent.

Vehicles types: The need to address the sometimes unique needs of African customers has led to a proliferation of local vehicle variants.

• A lack of tarmac and electrification in rural areas as well as the need for greater affordability in Africa is shaping local innovation. 

• Many vehicle companies started with Chinese and Indian products but found them ill-suited and soon switched to modifying them or designing their own.

Supply chains: This is where it gets really interesting. Smaller African nations may or may not be destined to manufacture cars at scale. 

• But the manufacture of ingredient parts suits even some industrial minnows.

• Ugandan state-owned vehicle makers are mandated to grow local supplies.

• Ethiopia is building a domestic battery industry leveraging local deposits of at least 110 million tonnes of lithium ore.

In the meantime: Africa has long had one heavyweight car manufacturer. South Africa has long made hundreds of thousands of vehicles for export, mainly to Europe. 

• Morocco has now overtaken South Africa, making more than half a million cars a year – for export to the EU, which sits on its doorstep. Egypt too is ramping up.

Questions remain: Will there be hundreds of vehicle companies in dozens of African countries a decade or two from now? 

• Do many of the new companies have a commercial future? Going up against Chinese manufacturers also rushing to the continent? 

• Or is this more of a speculative bubble, a series of venture-capital bets where even the investors only expect a fraction to win? 

Optimistic realism: Even if the majority of EV companies in Africa were to fail eventually, the planet could still be a winner (and investors too). 

• The current momentum suggests a market opportunity for electric vehicles in Africa.

• That could well create local industry and manufacturing jobs for Africans.  

• And the planet cares little how many different logos are on emission-free vehicles.