The Chery Omoda E5 EV Will Be Assembled In Kenya Starting Next Month! – CleanTechnica

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Just the other day, I wrote an article where I looked at how the passenger car sector in several countries could experience a shift to electric a whole lot faster than a lot of people think. This shift could be driven by the increasing availability of used and also significantly discounted fairly new electric vehicles in the larger auto markets, such as China, Europe, and North America. The supply chain to catalyze all of this is already there because 90% of vehicles that come to most countries on the African continent arrive as used ICE vehicles from these same markets, mostly via independent car dealers.

In the comments section of my last article, one of our regular readers, Steve _S, commented that “The potential of expanding into full on manufacturing of EVs on the African continent would be a huge boost to the economies.” Local assembly from SKD and CKD can be a good starting point to get to full manufacturing of electric cars on the continent. In some good news on this front, the Chinese company Chery has announced a new partnership with Kenyan Afrigreen Automobile Limited. This is a $20 million investment in an electric vehicle assembly plant in Kenya with a potential of 3000 direct and indirect jobs.

The Principal Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Investments and Trade, PS Abubakar Hassan, said, “The EV assembly plant will help the transport sector to become greener as we currently have about 4,000 e-vehicles against a population of about 1.7 million cars on the roads.”

The assembly plant will start operations next month (how cool is that?) with an initial capacity to produce between 5,000 and 6,000 EVs annually. This capacity is remarkably interesting, because at the moment, about 12,000 ICE vehicles are assembled in Kenya each year, meaning that we could have a situation where 33% of the active capacity of vehicle assembly in Kenya could be electric very soon. This excludes other announced plans for more electric car assembly lines in Thika, where annual production capacities are yet to be announced.

Kenya imports close to 100,000 used ICE vehicles per year in addition to the locally assembled fleet. If more affordable EVs are added to the local assembly mix, this could result in this share  of locally assembled EVs rising even further, displacing a decent chunk of used ICE vehicle imports.

Back to Chery. The first model that will be assembled in Kenya is the Chery Omoda E5 Electric SUV. The Chery Omoda has a 150kW motor (340Nm of torque), a top speed of 172km/h, acceleration from 0 to 100km/h in 7.2 seconds, a 61kWh LFP battery pack, and a V2L discharge power of 3.3kW. Chery says the Omoda E5 has a range of 430km (WLTP). The battery warranty is 8 years/160,000 miles, and the vehicle warranty is 7 years/150,000 miles. There is no information on pricing at the moment. However, locally assembled cars tend to be priced more favorably as compared with fully built imports, as they benefit from some reduced taxes.

Afrigreen says the Omoda E5 sport utility model is well suited for both urban and rural terrain in Kenya. It is great to see that a modern practical electric car with good range will be assembled in Kenya. A lot of exciting developments have been takin place in Kenya’s electric motorcycle and electric bus sectors, so it’s good to see that we are also getting some activity on the electric car side of things as well.

Image courtesy of Kenya’s Ministry of Investments, Trade, and Industry