EVs are starting to overtake gas-powered cars in Ethiopia

cnn.com

43 points·rntn··8 comments

"overtake" in the title seems very exaggerated

> There are around 100,000 EVs in Ethiopia so far. [1]

> The Ministry of Transport data indicates approximately two million vehicles in Ethiopia [2]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/17/climate/ethiopia-evs-gas-car-...

[2] https://ethionegari.com/2024/01/29/ethiopia-to-ban-entry-of-...

Well to be pedantic, if I'm in a car and I'm "starting to overtake", I'd still be behind the overtake "target", but I just started speeding up...

Not really, you first have to catch up the vehicle ahead, before you start overtaking. At present, they are miles behind.

I think this is referring to new car sales - vehicles in the third world tend to stay on the road a very long time, 30 to 40 years by my reckoning. It would take a long time for EVs to displace ICEVs by sheer numbers.

One would think that the e-bike is what would really revolutionize transportation in the third world, especially a place like Ethiopia that doesn't really see snow.

1.2M vehicles at 1 per 1,000 people = 1.2B people?

Their census workers run really fast?

Apparently counting cars in Ethiopia is hard.

In 2009 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-50426159 said it was 600K cars at 2 cars per 1000 people, so 300 million people.

In reality, the Ethiopia population is ~110 million (and it was much less back in 2009).

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