– credit Bako Motors
An ambitious motoring rollout is taking place in Tunisia, where a company is trying to make a splash in the market with a pair of solar-powered EVs.
Including a small delivery vehicle and a passenger car, Bako Motors is already manufacturing their models and selling them in the sun-washed continent’s showrooms.
CNN, which was first in America to cover Bako Motors, wrote that the market for EVs in Africa, where many countries import most of their vehicles, is predicted to reach several billion dollars by the end of the decade.
Fewer moving parts make EVs a smart solution to Africa’s rugged roads, but totally-absent charging infrastructure limits their deployment. Though lacking changing points, there is quite a lot of sunshine, and with solar panels on their roof, a Bako model can get 31 miles (50 km) of charge per day for free, substantially improving dependability.
“The solar cells provide us with more than 50% of our needs,” Boubaker Siala, founder and CEO of Bako Motors, told CNN.
“For example, the B-Van, for commercial use, you can have free energy for about 50 kilometers per day… 17,000 kilometers (10,563 miles) per year. It’s huge.”
Some 40% of the material that goes into each vehicle is sourced from the continent, including the lithium-iron-phosphate batteries and steel.
The B-Van costs around 25,000 Tunisian dinar, or $8,500, while the Bee, a small, two-seater city car, prices at $6,200. Neither vehicle is particularly fast, with the Bee scooting along at a top speed that’s less than what most of the continent’s petrol-powered mopeds can do, but a day in the sun can charge more than two-thirds of the vehicle’s battery, providing what could be a substantial savings in fuel and electricity.
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The B-Van can hold 800 pounds of cargo in the hold, has up to 162 miles of range, and is designed for last-mile delivery and artisanal market businesses which flourish—for example—along the whitewashed streets of Sidi Bou Said, near historic Carthage, where the car’s publicity video was shot.
For Bako Motors, the hard part—design and construction of the manufacturing facilities—are done. All that’s left is to get the Saudi Arabian and Tunisian plants running at nameplate capacity to churn out 8,000 of these cars for the continent’s cities, and eventual export to European centers.
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“The addressable market in Africa is about 1 million vehicles per year. We have to prepare ourselves for this transition (and) offer affordable and good products for the African citizen,” says Siala. “We are targeting maybe 5 to 10% of this market.”
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