It's a dynamic situation, because solar and battery costs have fallen so dramatically across Africa and thus imports have shot up across most countries, lots of it for domestic installations. This is a last-two-years phenomenon, really.

On the latter point, I think it's important to recognise that the pathway for families in relation to mobility is not two legs to four wheels. It's bikes, then motorbikes, then cars. And bikes and motorbikes benefit from electrification, and can be charged at home more readily than an EV from a domestic solar & battery setup in a typical African household.

Yup.

A quick scan of the Nature article didn’t seem to show anything for the rise of sodium batteries. Strikes me that pretty obviously, small sodium 4 wheelers will be a big winner in driving down costs for EVs in Africa. Both BYD and CATL now have sodium in production, and both are predicting substantially lower cost batteries as a result. Doesn’t work for the premium segments, where consumer demand long range, but African consumers are focused on affordability above all.
   

1. You’ve ignored the importance of solar & batteries, both domestic and community microgrids. These are central, just like mobile cell masts were central to why Africa largely skipped over landlines
2. Reliability is higher for EVs than for ICE, because of mechanical simplicity. You don’t need to maintain an electric motor, it’s sealed and is going to last and last.

You’re thinking in American terms. For people living in African countries, the calculus is completely different. For example, for an American, solar & battery is always an optional choice, because grid connections are just there for you, and are more or less reliable. For many people across Africa, grid connections are rare and the grid itself is completely unreliable. So the value of solar & battery is dramatically higher, and the comparator costs includes kerosene lamps and generators — both the fuel costs and also the impacts of living with noise, fumes and maintenance.

For the cars themselves, the key constraint is affordability, “what can I afford to buy today?”, not monthly payments.

Most cars in Africa are ether much smaller than American cars, or heavy duty off-road types. Not all cars, but most.

Also, EVs are not “much heavier”. Like-for-like, they tend to be about 20% heavier. Eg a small European ICE hatchback weighs about 1300kg, an EV version about 1500kg. That 200kg is the equivalent of four people in the car instead of one, ie no big deal.

Gasoline infra is just as easy to damage as EV infra. Solar and batteries are more islanded and thus more resilient than relying on a gas station.

It’s not just poised to expand rapidly, it *is* expanding rapidly. And mobility is not the first use case, either, which means that an analysis that assigns all the costs of SOG to charging an EV is thinking about this the wrong way. Households will install small domestic solar setups for light, refrigeration and charging phones and laptops at first. They will expand those setups in size and charge two-, then three-, then four-wheeled vehicles over time. The costs thus get amortised over a wider base of utility.

You guys = anti-EV types

I don’t need to google those things. I live in Europe. I’m aware of what EV incentives and ICE taxes exist, rather more than you are, and on top of that, on this topic, the European anti-EV types still have a point and you don’t — EVs still cost more upfront in Europe than ICE equivalents even after incentives and taxes are taken into account.

Micromobility is going to be a huge part of modal shifts.

Well, road surface abrasion too. But generally yes.

Funnily enough, BYD announced this week that they will launch solid state in 2027 which will deliver exactly that, in my view. BYD are pretty good at avoiding vapourware announcements and generally hit their deadlines. It’ll be some years after that before we see SSBs in value cars, as opposed to premium. But they’re on their way.

You guys ought to get together and agree a consistent line, because here in Europe, the anti-EV types regularly tell us that the upfront costs of buying an EV are still much much higher than buying an ICEV even after subsidies.

I don’t know what it’s like to have an EV in the US, but surely if you’re doing a 10 hour trip with (I assume) kids, you’ll want to stop for lunch, dinner and regular bathroom breaks? Can’t you just time the charging around those? That’s what I do here in the UK. Drive 2.5 hours, stop for lunch and charge the car at the same time, drive another 2.5 hours to my destination. My lunch/charging stop is 30 mins, which is enough for both me and the car.

A lot less than 6 hours! I can do it in 4 hours. 30 mins to St Pancras on the tube, 60mins for check in because I’m not paying for bloody Premier, and then 2.5 hours for the journey. Easy-peasy.

But there’s plenty of long trips available in Europe, eg from a Scandi city such as Helsinki or Trondheim to Lisbon is 2,500+ miles and will take bloody ages. Everyone who is not mad or wildly committed to low carbon living will fly that instead.

Other people want different things from you. I don’t want my 19 year old son routinely driving a car that does 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, I’m happy he has a Renault Zoe that does 0 to 60 in something like 12 seconds. It does 0 to 30 plenty fast enough to be zippy around town, and I want him driving at a nice relaxed pace on motorways. Accelerating your way out of trouble is mainly a way of accelerating your way *into* trouble, whereas braking is a reliably good way of avoiding trouble.