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By Laura Millan Lombrana and Fred Ojambo
INTERNATIONAL – The road from Kampala, the capital of Uganda, to Jinja, the site of Africa’s first electric bus factory, was filled with cars one morning in July.
Traffic has slowed down. Breathing hurts your throat. Kampala was the world’s most polluted city that day, according to OpenAQ, a tool to track global air pollution, and this was largely due to vehicle fumes. This was a lesson as to why it is so mandatory, and also so complicated, to move cars away from the continent from gas and diesel.
The 50-mile adventure lasted two hours and passed through small villages, tea plantations, sugarcane plantations and the gigantic rainforest of Mabira. The plant is still under construction, however, the new infrastructure needed for the plant has already provided local villagers with access to new roads, power lines and water pipes. This is a key step in Uganda’s industrialization plan.
“We are turning around a doleading whose main activity was mild subsistence farming for seasonal crops,” explains site engineer Alfred Niwamanya, referring to sugarcane planting and eucalyptus forest on the edge of the site. “We think that in the next 3 to five years, the people will be there.”
State-owned Kiira Motors Corp. expects to have an initial production capacity of 5,000 cars consistent with the year, adding buses, starting in July 2021. The company will sell buses to consistent state and public corporations operating shipping routes in and around Kampala. their costs will have to be competitive enough to compete with other suppliers who tout fossil fuel cars for the same customers. Kiira says she has still signed contracts, but is in talks with several clients.
The government expects 90% of parts of electric buses to be manufactured in Uganda. While the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries that force electric cars is a highly technical procedure that lately takes place mainly in China, some other parts of the bus can already be manufactured locally, adding windows, air filters, chassis and 12-volt batteries. force the radio.
“We want to demonstrate that we can manufacture our own device with Ugandan steel, lithium and copper, bamboo floors and banana fiber seats,” says Elioda Tumwesigye, Uganda’s Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Pollution is a major challenge in Kampala that officials have been looking to solve for decades. Most of the capital’s 3 million citizens in 14-seat minibuses or diesel and petrol motorcycles. Today, about 85% of Uganda’s cars are used, imported from other countries, dirtier and less effective than similar models lately on the streets of Europe and the United States.
The origins of the Kiira bus date back to 2007, when academics and Makerere University in Kampala joined a global initiative led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to design a five-passenger plug-in hybrid vehicle. After this experience, academics and teachers continued to paint on request and, in November 2011, the Kiira EV, an all-electric two-seater car and the first to be designed and built in Africa, arrived here outside the meeting line. Subsequently, the corporation also produced prototypes of a five-seater car and an electric bus that recharged in real time with rooftop solar panels.
In 2018, Kiira Motors partnered with CHTC Motor Co Ltd of China, a subsidiary of Sinomach Automobile Co Ltd. Kayoola EVS, they were completed in a military facility 115 kilometers north of Kampala.
While Chinese batteries and know-how enable Uganda to expand its own electric vehicle industry, the country’s corporations are competitors of Kiira. “Our biggest challenge, of course, will be China, the big players that make electric cars more effective in terms of prices,” Tumwesigye says. Today, Chinese corporations account for 99% of the global electric bus fleet, according to Bloomberg NEF. The global electric bus market grew to about 500,000 sets last year, up from 100,000 4 years ago.
The lack of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa causes the electric vehicle revolution to move at a slower rate than in other parts of the world, but in some countries politics is driving it.
Neighboring Rwanda announced in May 2019 that it was looking for all mototaxis to be electric and Volkswagen AG is assembling electric cars in a factory in the capital, Kigali. Cape Town, South Africa, is one of the cities that signed the C40 Fossil Fuel Free Streets Declaration, which is committed to offering zero-emission buses only from 2025. Automakers operating in the country are pressuring the government to abandon imports of price lists electric vehicles and deployment of cargo infrastructure.
Tumwesigye is determined to make the e-bus assignment more than a single assignment. The government plans to include the company in the inventory bag once mass production of electric buses has begun. And the plan is for other outdoors in Uganda to eventually ride them.
“It’s just ugandan market,” Tumwesigye says. “We take a look at the African markets and beyond.”
Bloomberg
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