Earlier this year, BETAR reported that Africa has approximately 200 public electric vehicle charging points across a continent of 1.4 billion people. The infrastructure gap is real and documented — a $5 billion annual investment shortfall relative to what the continent needs to support even modest EV adoption rates. That story, framed around charging infrastructure, generated significant reader response. The follow-on question that emerged from that coverage is the one this analysis addresses: who actually builds the vehicles?
The answer is more complicated than the smartphone analogy suggests. When Chinese handset manufacturers flooded Africa with low-cost devices in the 2010s, the infrastructure requirement was minimal — a charging cable and a SIM card. Electric vehicles are a different industrial proposition: they require local parts availability, technician training, warranty networks, and grid infrastructure that smartphones never needed. The winning model for EV distribution in Africa will not simply be the cheapest product. It will be the model that best solves the total cost of ownership problem.
Three competing models are currently trying to solve that problem.
Model One: Local Assembly, Imported Components
The most promising model for industrial value creation is local assembly using imported components — primarily sourced from Chinese manufacturers but assembled on the continent. Two Kenyan companies have demonstrated this approach at meaningful scale.
BasiGo, the Nairobi-based electric bus company, operates more than 100 electric buses on Nairobi’s public transit routes. The buses use BYD chassis and battery packs imported from China, assembled and commissioned in Kenya. The business model is built on a pay-as-you-drive financing structure that eliminates the upfront capital barrier for matatu saccos and transit operators. More importantly for the industrial policy question: the assembly, maintenance, and after-sales operation is local. BasiGo employs Kenyan mechanics trained on the drivetrain. When a bus needs repair, the parts supply chain runs through Nairobi, not Shenzhen.
Roam Motors takes a similar approach for electric motorcycles and what it calls electric matatus — the minibuses that carry the majority of urban passengers across East Africa. Roam has deployed more than 2,000 units and is building a local production facility in Nairobi. The company’s thesis is that a motorcycle built for African road conditions — with suspension tuned for unpaved roads, battery chemistry optimised for heat, and charging systems that work at unreliable grid voltages — performs better in service than a direct import designed for European or East Asian markets.
In South Africa, Ampere Electric Vehicles is assembling small EVs at the Atlantis Special Economic Zone in the Western Cape — a manufacturing cluster with legacy industrial infrastructure that the South African government has been attempting to redevelop as a clean energy manufacturing hub. The South Africa 2026 Budget included an enhanced tax deduction for local EV and battery component manufacturing (covered separately in BETA-620), a direct incentive designed to attract this kind of assembly investment.
The economics of local assembly are tight. Margins are thin when competing against finished imports. But the model creates jobs, reduces import duty exposure, enables local service networks, and — critically — builds the institutional knowledge that could eventually support deeper localisation. It is the template that South Korea and Malaysia used to build automotive industries from assembly operations in the 1970s and 1980s.
Model Two: Chinese Direct Import
The alternative is more straightforward and, in the short term, commercially attractive: import finished EVs directly from Chinese manufacturers at price points significantly below European and Japanese internal combustion alternatives.
BYD’s Atto 3 and Seagull models are entering South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria in the 2025-2026 cycle. The Seagull — BYD’s entry-level hatchback — is priced at approximately $10,000-12,000 in China. At that price point, adjusted for import duties and logistics, it can reach African markets at $18,000-25,000. That remains out of reach for most African consumers, but it is competitive with Japanese and European ICE imports in the $20,000-30,000 band that serves the formal private vehicle market in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria.
The commercial logic for Chinese manufacturers is sound. Africa is one of the few global markets where they face minimal regulatory barriers — no emissions standards to comply with, no legacy dealer network to protect, and no domestic EV competitor to worry about. The question for African policymakers is whether the direct import model serves the continent’s development agenda.
The risks are visible in consumer electronics: when a Chinese smartphone breaks, the spare part arrives from a grey market distributor. When a BYD Atto 3 breaks in Lagos — where BYD has no authorised service centre — the warranty process is opaque and the repair ecosystem is thin. For a $25,000 vehicle, that service gap is a meaningful deterrent to adoption among buyers who need the car to work.
Model Three: Indian Budget EVs
The third model is less developed but strategically important: Indian manufacturers entering African markets with sub-$15,000 options, particularly in the two- and three-wheeler segments that carry the majority of urban African commuters.
Bajaj Auto and TVS Motor Company already distribute petrol-powered motorcycles across East Africa at scale. Both companies have electric variants in production — Bajaj’s Chetak EV and TVS’s iQube — and the distribution networks they have built for ICE products provide a ready infrastructure for EV introduction. Bajaj’s Qute three-wheeler, a quadricycle positioned between a motorcycle and a car, is already present in several African markets.
Tata Motors and Mahindra are exploring passenger EV entry into South Africa and East Africa through existing dealer networks. Neither has committed to local assembly at this stage. But the India-Africa manufacturing corridor has structural advantages that China lacks: geographic proximity for certain East African markets, established AGOA and AfCFTA trade frameworks that create duty advantages for assembly within qualifying economies, and price points more aligned with African purchasing power in the $8,000-15,000 band.
The Industrial Policy Question
The three models are not mutually exclusive. South Africa will almost certainly see all three operating simultaneously within five years — local assembly at Atlantis and a handful of other facilities, Chinese direct imports serving the formal private market, and Indian two-wheelers and budget EVs entering through East African distribution networks.
The question for African governments is which model they want to incentivise, because incentive structures will determine which model wins. South Africa’s 2026 EV manufacturing tax deduction (BETA-620) is a signal that Pretoria prefers local assembly. Kenya’s approach to BasiGo and Roam — allowing them to operate in the transit system and providing regulatory support for pay-as-you-drive models — is a different kind of policy signal, one that prioritises fleet electrification over individual vehicle ownership.
For the continent’s industrialisation agenda, the difference matters more than it might appear. Africa imported approximately $40 billion worth of vehicles in 2024. If electrification proceeds through direct import, that import bill shifts from Japanese and German ICE manufacturers to Chinese and Indian EV manufacturers. If it proceeds through local assembly, a portion of that value chain is retained on the continent — in jobs, in institutional knowledge, and in the supplier ecosystems that grow around assembly operations.
The EV transition is not just an energy story. It is an industrial policy choice with a narrow window. The infrastructure investment decisions and regulatory frameworks being set now — in South Africa’s Atlantis SEZ, in Kenya’s transit procurement policy, in Nigeria’s import duty structure — will determine whether Africa electrifies on its own terms or on someone else’s.
What Investors Are Watching
For the investment community, the practical near-term question is which companies have the service infrastructure to reduce the total cost of ownership risk that currently limits fleet adoption. BasiGo’s pay-as-you-drive model and Roam’s local service network are designed to answer that question. Both companies are likely to attract additional capital in 2026-2027 as charging infrastructure catches up with the vehicle supply.
The longer-term opportunity is in component localisation. Battery pack assembly, motor winding, and power electronics manufacturing are all industries that African manufacturers could build with the right capital and policy support. Morocco’s Gotion High-Tech battery gigafactory (BETA-542) — the first large-scale battery manufacturing facility in Africa — is the clearest demonstration that this localisation is possible. Whether it replicates beyond the North African manufacturing corridor into sub-Saharan Africa is the industry question that the next five years will answer.
