The traffic crawled. Breathing hurt your throat. Kampala was the most polluted city in the world that day, according to OpenAQ, a global air pollution tracker, and much of that was due to vehicle fumes. The journey was a lesson in why it’s so necessary—and also so challenging—to move the continent’s vehicles away from gasoline and diesel.
The government is hoping that 90% of the e-bus parts could eventually be made in Uganda. While manufacturing the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles is a highly technical process that’s currently done mostly in China, some other parts of the bus can already be made locally, including the windows, air filters, frame, and the 12-volt batteries that power the radio.
The origins of the Kiira bus date back to 2007, when students and staff at Kampala’s Makerere University joined a global initiative led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to design a 5-passenger plug-in hybrid vehicle. After that experience, students and professors kept working on their own project, and in November 2011 the Kiira EV, a two-passenger fully electric car and the first to be designed and built in Africa, rolled off the assembly line.
The lack of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa means the electric vehicle revolution is advancing at a slower pace there, compared to other parts of the world, but in a few countries, policy is nudging it along.
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