Probably helped by the fact that they have really low amount of cars anyway: They’re ranked at 189th out of 195 countries when listed by motor vehicles by capita according to Wikipedia. They have a whopping of 10 vehicles per 1000 people and total of 1,200,000 vehicles in total while being the 13th most populous country in the world.
Ah, so this is basically mandating that your unicorn needs to be painted pink…
I suspected car ownership would be low, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad though.
Well usually I’m in the fuck cars camp, especially as I’m pretty much forced to bicycle everywhere.
In a rich western country, low car ownership would be great. But cars are also an indicator of personal and economic prosperity. Car ownership is good ‘to a point’ so to speak.
Since the per capita gross national income of Ethiopia is barely above a thousand dollars, I don’t think they’re making informed decisions vis-a-vis car ownership. They simply can’t afford them. Heck, they can barely afford a bicycle I imagine.
I would wager significant money that China has a big hand in this.
The Belt and Road initiative has been letting them get their hooks into Africa quite well and Ethiopia is still not a rich country, if you are reasonably well off and can afford a vehicle chances are its not going to be a Polestar or a Tesla. BYD, LDV and GWM are going to become the default brands.
Tired: going EV-only because of the environment and future-proofing
Wired: going EV-only because the gas/petrol is so darnged expensive to import
The catch is no one has a car.
It kind of is. The larger your income, the larger your carbon footprint, and that scales indefinitely.
So, can some insider give more information on this? The dam that they’re planning to draw the energy from is highly contested, with Egypt, right? They also don’t seem to have a lot of infrastructure for charging those vehicles. And apparently this decision hasn’t been put into action yet?
@sir_pronoun GERD (the dam) is already partly operating but yes contested.
The plan seems to be primarily aimed at slowing fuel imports. Worth noting their leader Abiy has created a coalition of almost all the political parties so it’s now almost a de-facto one party state (except places he has attacked like Tigray, which is now in famine).
Here is a better article on it
Personally I think there’s going to be problems.
I don’t live there anymore but my father owns a few small businesses that rely heavily on road transport. This decision hasn’t come into effect yet but is due to be implemented at the end of march. As a result there has been a huge influx of poor quality used cars on the roads and put into storage waiting to be sold at a markup. Most people here won’t be able to afford electric cars so it seems like a bad decision by a government trying to impress its neighbours on the global stage but it won’t matter because they are very popular with the younger voters. The most interesting part though is this was all made up. I live in Mexico and couldn’t point to Ethiopia on a map
So no more imports of cars unless they’re electric.
What about trucks, busses, ships, planes etc?
Not to mention who has the money to buy a new electric car in todays economy anyway?
I’m only saying banning the import of internal combustion engine vehicles includes a whole host of things beyond just cars.
A lot of these other things dont have an electric counterpart available yet.
