Africa’s Homemade EVs; Starting Gun for Sea Mining?

And more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology—and how we can do better.

May 01, 2025

Yuma Sasaki is aiming to help Ethiopia leapfrog right over gasoline vehicles into an electric-powered future. But not by importing Teslas, or even cheap Chinese EVs. Instead, his startup, Dodai, builds electric motorbikes right in the capital of Addis Ababa. It’s one of a small but growing number of homegrown companies building electric vehicles in Africa, for Africans.

Historically, vehicle manufacturing—even for smaller conveyances like motorbikes—required lots of capital and industrial equipment, which is why it was only done in developed countries. But electric vehicles are much simpler machines. Where a gasoline powered motor has hundreds of moving parts—pistons, valves, crankshafts and so on—an electric motor can have as few as one. The whole vehicle requires far fewer components, and most of them can be bought off the shelf. That enables companies like Dodai to import the bits and pieces they need and assemble them in Africa. Sasaki says their e-bikes comprise just 150 parts all in, which they buy mostly from China. Conventional motorcycles can have ten times as many parts.

Electric motorbikes also cost much less to buy than electric cars. Plus they are generally cheaper to operate. That makes them attractive to the legions of motorbike taxi drivers in most African cities. “Average Ethiopians can’t afford electric cars,” Sasaki tells me. “I’m not interested in building nice cars to sell to the wealthy. I am interested in selling to the majority.”

Sasaki, who used to work in Uber’s Japan branch, moved to Ethiopia in 2021 because of the opportunity he sees there. The numbers are still small, but growing fast. Dodai has sold about 1,000 e-bikes. Uganda’s Kiira Motors cranks out electric buses and Nigeria’s Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing makes full-size electric cars. Africa’s biggest EV maker, Spiro, which launched in Togo in 2020, says it has put 30,000 e-bikes on the roads of several countries.

Meanwhile, Rwanda-based Ampersand has sold around 3,000 e-bikes in its home country and has expanded into Kenya. The company recently announced a deal with BYD, the Chinese EV giant, to buy enough batteries to build 40,000 e-motorbikes by the end of next year. Bonus advantage: those batteries, like the ones Dodai uses, are made with lithium, iron and phosphates, with none of the rainforest-imperiling nickel or child-labor associated cobalt of traditional EV batteries.

Ethiopia gave a major and unique boost to its domestic EV industry last year, with a revolutionary policy that bans the import of all gasoline powered vehicles. This makes all kinds of sense. For oil and gas, Ethiopia relies on imports. But it generates its own electricity, 96 percent of it from zero-carbon hydropower. “They have the cheapest electricity on the continent, while their oil prices are among the highest,” says Sasaki. Plus, gas and diesel vehicles spew out air pollution, including of course carbon emissions.

The ban is having its intended effect. “Two years ago, there were zero EVs here,” says Sasaki. Now, around 100,000 electric buses, cars and motorbikes prowl Ethiopia’s streets, and then government experts that number to more than quadruple by 2032.

I think Ethiopia’s gas vehicle import ban is a very savvy move, one I hope other developing countries in particular are paying attention to. There’s a real window of opportunity here to change the direction of their development. The number of cars on Ethiopia’s roads is still very low—“about 1.2 million in total, or roughly one car for every 100 people,” according to CNN. In the US, there are more than 283 million, almost one per person.

Getting millions of people to switch from gas vehicles to electric is very difficult. Getting millions of people who have never owned any sort of vehicle to start with an electric one is much easier. It’s also much easier to build charging infrastructure from scratch than it is to unravel a long-established system of pipelines and gas stations and build charging infrastructure.

Focussing on electric motorbikes instead of electric cars is also a smart move. They’re more affordable, and they require far fewer critical metals and other resources. Plus they generate less traffic and need less space to park in. Smaller, in short, is better. I don’t know if Dodai will succeed as a business, but I sure hope the model of homemade, small-scale EVs does.

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Starting Gun for Sea Mining?

The possibility of private companies digging up the ocean floor for critical metals took a couple of big steps toward becoming a reality last week, cheered on by President Trump.

First, Trump signed an executive order calling for the US to develop deep sea mineral mining and processing capabilities. Within days, The Metals Company, the most aggressive of the would-be sea mining outfits, applied to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a license to start industrial sea scale mining—something which has never been done before. NOAA seems likely to approve. “The United States will lead the world in deep sea mineral extraction, and NOAA is the tip of the spear,” a top agency official, recently appointed by Trump, brayed to the Wall Street Journal. Dozens of other countries say this would violate international law—including China, which also wants to mine the ocean floor but abides by globally-agreed on rules.

Nutshell context: Parts of the Pacific’s seabed are carpeted with fist-sized rocks containing possibly hundreds of billions of dollars worth nickel, cobalt, manganese and other critical metals. Companies and governments have for years wanted to harvest them, but under international law, that requires permission from the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority. The ISA has so far said ‘no’ to all comers because of concern over the enormous damage that seabed mining could cause. The US, however, never signed on to the treaty that established the ISA. (For more details see my chapter on the issue in Power Metal, the book, excerpted here.) Somehow, the administration believes that gives them the authority to permit mining in international waters.

As I’ve said before: If the US does unilaterally green light deep sea mining, several other countries including India and China could well follow suit. Worst case, we could see a free-for-all at the bottom of the Pacific, with a hodgepodge of companies and countries ripping up as much of the seafloor as they can before their rivals get there.

Book News

I’ll be talking about Power Metal at Seattle’s Town Hall this coming Monday, May 5 with Michael Bradbury of the mighty Northwest Science Writers’ Association. Come on down!