EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports (financialpost.com) 82
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country's climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia's budget, costing the state billions of dollars over the past decade. The country defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 2023 after rising interest rates drove up the costs of servicing its debts, and it received a $3.4 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund the following year.
In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country -- according to the government's own figures -- some way above the global average of 4%. "The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'"
For decades, Ethiopia's high import tariffs on vehicles put new car ownership out of the reach of most of the country's population. Per capita gross domestic product is only about $1,000, and even by the standards of low-income countries, it has among the lowest car ownership rates. At 13 vehicles per 1,000 people, it's a fraction of the African average of 73. With few cars manufactured in the country, the vast majority are imported, and most are bought used. The government's import policy has upended the market. In parallel, tariffs for EVs were dropped to 15% for completed cars, 5% for parts and semi-assembled vehicles, and zero for "fully knocked down" -- vehicles shipped in parts and assembled locally. That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars.
In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country -- according to the government's own figures -- some way above the global average of 4%. "The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'"
For decades, Ethiopia's high import tariffs on vehicles put new car ownership out of the reach of most of the country's population. Per capita gross domestic product is only about $1,000, and even by the standards of low-income countries, it has among the lowest car ownership rates. At 13 vehicles per 1,000 people, it's a fraction of the African average of 73. With few cars manufactured in the country, the vast majority are imported, and most are bought used. The government's import policy has upended the market. In parallel, tariffs for EVs were dropped to 15% for completed cars, 5% for parts and semi-assembled vehicles, and zero for "fully knocked down" -- vehicles shipped in parts and assembled locally. That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars.
Re:How can you call it boom? (Score:5, Insightful)
Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason.
The number of EVs went up by over five-fold, that is a boom. You may not *like* why it happened, but it happened.
Further given the context, I don't think it's like the people are going to call 'bullshit' or anything, the entire nation has fewer cars than you'll find in medium sized US cities. Looks like you might be over a hundred miles from the nearest gas station for most of the country. Looks like there's no such thing as convenient long-haul refueling for gas either.
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Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason.
I see. So you think it would be accurate to say Forced Labor Camps Boom in North Korea?
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US private corrections facility company enters the chat...
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No one forced EVs
According to TFA: " the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles". What is your understanding of "banned the import"?
You are still able to manufacture your own internal combustion engine cars in Ethiopia.
Is that "if you don't like censorship, build your own Internet" kind of logic?
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I agree with you that banning imports is results in the same as banning the product entirely because one can't reasonably expect Ethiopians to start new ICE car companies (for many reasons). But it is to be noted that Ethiopian company "Marathon Motors Engineering", started as a distributor, moved in 2017 to assemble Hyundai cars in Ethiopia. They currently assemble the Ioniq (an EV).
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Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason.
Really? No matter the reason? How about you look up the actual definition of that before you spout the marketing bullshit few believe anymore. "generally driven by high consumer confidence", doesn't exactly define a forced mandate.
First, "generally" does not mean "always", so your definition is not in conflict with the statement "Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason."
Second, you didn't give a source for your definition, Here's online Merriam Webster definition 2b [merriam-webster.com]:
: to experience a sudden rapid growth and expansion usually with an increase in prices
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If we’re going to get all technical about it, a boom is an economic term referring to a period of high and growing economic activity. It’s not a technical economic term for a growth in a particular product’s sales. So I have no idea what you think you’re quoting with you reference to “generally driven by high consumer confidence”, but that’s almost certainly a snippet from a definition of a technical term that doesn’t apply to this more prosaic use of the term
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Boom simply means that a product/category is seeing more popularity, no matter the reason.
Only being able to buy EVs these past couple years kinda had an outsized influence on the market.
p>The number of EVs went up by over five-fold, that is a boom. You may not *like* why it happened, but it happened.
This quote stands out to me:
The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'"
Saying "We may as well import the (cars) that cleans up local air..." ignores the fact that it is illegal to import non-EVs, there's no choice.
The actual increase in EV cars on the road is easily attributable to consumers simply replacing older cars as they wear out EV market share went up 5% over two years, that's 2.5% a year - if a car lasts 40 years, you'd expect to turn over about
Re: How can you call it boom? (Score:2)
People embraced EVs. Just as long as by people, you mean not your average Ethiopian, but the ones making decisions in Ethiopia.
And so? That's how it works with most things everywhere. If you're bothered by how the decisions by people with money and power influence regular people's decisions, I suggest you have bigger fish to fry than EVs in Ethiopia.
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Yeah, fretting about cars in ethiopia, based on the stated adoption rate, would be like people getting up in arms over particulars of yacht ownership in the USA.
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Only being able to buy EVs these past couple years kinda had an outsized influence on the market.
Yes, and that would be a plausible reason for a 'Boom', government mandates can cause these things regardless of consumer sentiment. A boom just means an expanded economic result, it does not speak to the motivation or virtue of the expansion, just that it is.
Saying "We may as well import the (cars) that cleans up local air..." ignores the fact that it is illegal to import non-EVs, there's no choice.
It's not ignoring it, the 'We' in that statement are the people making the policy decision. This isn't saying that consumers are deciding what to import, it's a statement of the reasoning the government expresses as they made this change.
The actual increase in EV cars on the road is easily attributable to consumers simply replacing older cars as they wear out
I don't know
Re:How can you call it boom? (Score:5, Informative)
If you actually read the article instead of just pontificating from a position of ignorance, you’ll find a perfectly straightforward explanation of the policy shift. In the olden days, the only choice for a car was for it to be an ICE car. But that cost the government a lot of money, because Ethiopia had to import the fuel. But it’s not the olden days any more. Ethiopia has a big shiny dam and a surplus of electricity, and EVs are relatively cheaper, so it improves the country’s finances considerably to prefer the drivetrain that uses the cheap homegrown elecricity instead of the expensive imported fuel.
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What are you *talking* about? The balance of costs between Ethiopians as taxpayers and Ethiopians as consumers is completely irrelevant to whether it’s expensive for Ethiopians to import fuel. Obviously. It doesn’t become magically costless for Ethiopians if the government stops subsidizing it, it just gets carried as a cost by everyone who’s reliant on fuel, which isthe entire Ethiopian population, the same payee basis as for tax. Sheesh.
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Make no difference. Whether you pay taxes and those dollars subsidise fuel or you pay the fuel directly the cost is the same. Fuel is a fungible product. When you don't have it, you need to import it. That cost more money than producing it locally, unless you can find a country which produces it cheaper. Easy to do for a rich company, impossible to do for a 3rd world country.
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Yeah, there's a lot of people projecting from areas with ubiquitous cars and robust fossil fuel infrastructure and can't imagine a context where combustion engines aren't as amazingly convenient. Getting upset on behalf of a population that probably mostly does not care.
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I will wager that Ethiopians travel in vehicles quite a lot, largely shared minibuses, and ICE minibuses are prone to breaking down in a way that EV minibuses won’t, so Ethiopians will find the greater reliability an important benefit of this transition. The article describes the expansion of EV minibuses as an assembly activity in the country
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Boom implies that people choosing EVs, which is clearly not the case here if it is mandated.
Fuck you and your outdated definition of "boom". The new definition is here to stay.
(Just in case you were wondering how we got here. It was because the masses chose to not bitch-slap the living shit out of stupidity and incompetence when it started speaking in public.)
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The last line of the summary is the interesting bit: "That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars."
They reached price parity, so people do have a choice. They can buy a fossil car still, albeit a used one. I'm not saying it's a completely equal, free choice, but it's also not fully compelled either.
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The government squeezes the car market so tightly that there is almost no activity, and when they loosen their grip it's like they've made some great achievement. No, they've been screwing up their economy for a long time and accidentally took a half-step in the right direction.
This all feels like a variation on the broken window fallacy.
Re: How can you call it boom? (Score:2)
How tiny can a "boom" go? (Score:1)
So the obvious low-hanging joke that I was looking for and not finding was about the clickbait title for the story. Ethiopia is not exactly the biggest market for cars, so if a tree falls on an electric car in an Ethiopian forest and crushes the driver (so now no one is there), does it still make a sound?
Actually I should do some research on Ethiopia and it's long history. I know it's a fairly populous country, so it must have cities and cars, but I don't even know if it has any forests these years.
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About 15% of the land area is forested. It used to be more like two thirds.
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Thanks for the informative reply, but I never get a mod point to give so I can't mod you thusly. Nor did I get my Funny mod on this one and your reply mostly made me notice the typo... (I did get a recent Funny for a clown joke about funny meat. But it was a stale joke...)
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*sigh*
s/it's long history/its long history/
Red Barchetta (Score:3, Insightful)
"When gas-fueled cars are outlawed, only outlaws will have gas-powered cars."
Canadian band Rish warned us about this. So did Australian actor Mel Gibson.
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Yes, and the only historical measure where it isn't is if you go way way before humans were kicking about. By any *human* history it's already too warm, and exacerbating our path toward an unfamiliar climate is not a huge comfort just because prehistoric fauna could cope on some scale, nothing to know that human civilization at our current scale can be sustained under such conditions.
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Correlation is not causation. Tech is the big factor for our current rise to dominance over nature, rather than any warming climate.
Big negative changes for populations, like loss of food security, is exactly what causes wars to break out. Widespread floods and droughts are still something we can't deal with technologically.
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Correlation is not causation.
We have enough data to safely assume causation. Civilizations that adapted to extreme cold, such as Inuit, are universally non-technological. That is, farming, which requires temperate climate, is a clear prerequisite for technological civilization to exist. I stand by my earlier assertion.
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LOL. And all that happened *during* the last ice age. You could just as easily say it was the ice-age that gave us the tech.
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I think you're mistaking the lack of evidence for the actuality of absence. But most relicts don't survive. Stone tools a durable, but wood and fiber aren't.
Also, even at maximal glaciation there were large areas that were temperate. Many of them are currently under water, so we really haven't even looked at them.
Additionally, technologies take time to develop. With relatively small populations, the development is slower. There is probably a minimum population size that is required for each degree of t
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What's more, human activities have been so large we've flipped the direction of climate trajectory. The natural cycle had been heading back towards an ice-age.
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Talk about missing the point! We've got the collective strength to flip the climate of the whole planet!
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Do you think not heading towards ice-age is a bad thing? Would you rather lose some shorelines to raising water or have mile-deep ice sheet all the way to Texas?
Clearly a new glaciation would not be a good thing. Last I heard the glacial cycle timing discussed, though, the end of the interglacial wasn't expected for another 10,000 years.
Keep in mind it is possible that both too cold and too warm are undesirable.
Overheating? [Re:Red Barchetta] (Score:2)
What do you mean by "overheated our planet"? Are you saying that Earth climate is too warm right now? This is simply not true by any historical measure.
I think I may side with your kvetching here. We have seen pretty conclusive evidence of global warming, but the amount of warming so far doesn't seem to be "overheating" as of 2026.
Are you saying that Earth climate going to become too warm if certain things happen?
Right, you nailed it. If we keep burning fossil-fuels and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the warming due to the greenhouse effect will continue to rise. Eventually this will have bad effects.
If so, when and what must happen for this forecast to become true?
I will direct you to the various IPCC reports. Try the synthesis report first: https://www.ipcc.ch/synthesis-... [www.ipcc.ch] , but for details
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Canadian band Rish warned us about this.
Larry Niven, is that you?
Rent-Free... again (Score:2)
Oh look I'm important again, my troll is back to ride my dick. They modded this and the next two posts down because they didn't understand what I wrote, as usual.
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Right now I’d make it:
“When gas-fueled cars are outlawed, only non-legacy American car manufacturers will sell abroad”.
Given the state of auto manufacturers and US oil business, with their focus on lobbying to weaken EPA environmental regulations, they will have to play catch-up. Certainly EVs certainly have always to go in terms of battery technologies and reducing costs, but they are improving given the increased investments. The problem for the US is that it keeps on giving up its techn
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I wasn't aware of the answer myself, but one article (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8d4v69jw6o), from June 2025, I found suggests a number of factors, including:
- economies of scale
- battery technology
- deep integration
- national vision to build out fore the future (something the US is lacking right now)
Re: Red Barchetta (Score:2)
Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Score:1, Interesting)
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They also don't, nationally, produce enough energy. Enen with that energy deficit, they were still exporting electricity to Djibouti, Sudan, and Kenya as of 2024. I'm sure this will be viewed as a wonderful decision when viewed from 2030.
Re:Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Failing to see the downside here.
Once solar panels are installed, and they ain't expensive, the electricity is free. And Ethiopia is equatorial, so it gets fantastic insolation. Why keep paying over again for oil when you can pay for solar panels once?
Best of luck to Ethiopia, but they are now fully a Chinese client state.
If you're not a major power, or part of a bloc, you need to pick your poison. If you think this kind of thing is bad, then vote for whoever supports international development. Countries ar
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Sure, but it's not like Ethiopia has the manufacturing base to make cars or solar panels. They're going to be relying on foreign cars and foreign solar panels either way.
Re: Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Score:2)
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If the US wanted a piece of that sweet Ethiopian infra action or felt it important to lock out the Chinese for strategic, political o moral reasons, they could have, ya know, offered up their own services. But they didn’t, and the Ethiopians needed outside expertise and the Chinese were there to supply it. Whining after the fact while pursuing an idiotic form of isolationism is very MAGAT, so well done you for fitting in with your best friend paedos.
Gasoline Subsidies (Score:3)
It looks like they are getting rid of subsidies on gasoline as well, which will also make electric vehicles more attractive.
Ethiopiaâ(TM)s Government Officially Ends Fuel Subsidy: Prices to Follow Global Market Rates [addisinsight.net]
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Here's the thing. Oil is concentrated in a few countries, and if you do not have oil resources, you have to pay other countries for it.
Electricity, though, is everywhere. You can get it in various forms, and while you may have to buy solar panels, once you put them up, they power EVs for a really long time.
So you could import a gallon of oil and once you use that gallon up, import another gallon of oil, Lather, rinse, repeat.
Or you could import a solar panel, and now have basically a limitless supply of ele
Well, what a (pleasant?) surprise. (Score:3)
I certainly did _not_ have Ethiopia in my top list of progressive environmentally aware ueber-hipster compliant countries but you never know.
Two thinks do make sense though:
1.) It's totally logical for Afrika to skip any outdated ICE tech and infrastructure and go strait to the good new stuff.
2.) Quite a few parts of Afrika have been gaining traction and gotten on top of things. Ruanda has a rise in womans rights and participation due to the exorbitant male death toll from that civil war / epically uncivil slaughtering a few decades back. Botswana is a doorstep country closing in on a bona-fide first-world situation fast. IIRC there are quite a few other countries on a similar trajectory.
I hope for Afrika and the world that this encouraging trend continues.
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But that's not fair! You folks got to drive land barges with oversized fins. We want the same rights.
Cheap Hydro Power (Score:2)
Ethiopia is doing really well (Score:2)
Check it out here (skip the first 2 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The real reason people getting panties in a wad (Score:3)
People are harrumphing about government intervention blah blah blah etc. But I think what’s really going on is that they are made uneasy by the notion that there are governments and consumers out there who do not think like them, who have completely different motivations, and who do not give two hoots about ICE for the sake of ICE, because they do not share the emotional commitment to ICE. It’s the sicky feeling you get when you realise that how you conceived of the world isn’t as universal as you once thought it was. They can pull the protectionist blanket round America and continue with fossil fuels there, but the rest of the world isn’t going to sit by, other countries are going to make different decisions that are in their interests.
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Cool things happening in Dhaka, Senegal, too (Score:2)
A new fleet of 131 EV buses has rolled out. Faster journey times, lower carbon emissions, no tailpipe emissions, solar charging, quieter. Great stuff!
https://youtu.be/3p8ldPpB2ic?s... [youtu.be]