6 ms·

It begins: Ethiopia set to become first country to ban internal combustion cars

69 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

EA-3167 3y ago
I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the world, in fact out of 195 ranked countries Ethiopia is 189th (tied with Burundi, and just ahead of CAR, the DRC, Somalia and Sudan). Even given that however, as the article states there simply isn't a charging infrastructure to support a shift to electric. More, this sounds like it's largely motivated by economic factors: > "Ethiopian here. Main reason for this is the fact that it's currently struggling with a severe foreign exchange shortage, affecting its ability to import oil and other commodities. Aside from this surprising announcement, lack of foreign currency has also led to a significant push towards enhancing its agricultural productivity and boosting its local production of light manufactured goods." It's hard to imagine how that's going to square with a nationwide charging network for the 1.2 million vehicle owners out of 128 million Ethiopians. citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_motor_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
- ttfkam 3y ago
  Given one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles, it likely also lacks petroleum infrastructure as well. You don't make a huge number of gas stations when there aren't many cars. If given the choice of building up a transportation infrastructure based on hydrocarbons only to be torn down as the world moves toward electrification versus fast tracking your electrical grid, the latter seems an obvious choice. With the decline in solar prices, it allows for greater decentralization in that infrastructure. Solar ends up a (relative) one-time purchase. Oil is a constant importation drain on your economy. It's cell phones all over again, skipping over the landline step. Why string phone cables to every home when you can just concentrate on a relative few cell towers?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    All great points between your comment and the one that you replied to. What’s really exciting is that every country has electrical infrastructure practitioners: electricians, linemen, etc, so the roll out of charging infra can be done very rapidly with proper training and resourcing. It also probably helps that China isn’t yet importing EVs to the developed world at scale, so all of those EVs built beyond domestic consumption will be shipped to places like Ethiopia. Mass produced Chinese EVs speeding the death of combustion vehicles in the developing world seems like a net win.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > electricians, linemen, etc, so the roll out of charging infra can be done very rapidly with proper training and resourcing. Not really, the electricians and the linemen are busy with maintenance, to roll out more infra you need a massive influx of capital.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Savings from fossil fuel costs? Investing in electrical infra delivers returns from deprecating ongoing fossil consumption and associated spend.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        That would be a trickle compared to what is required. HV power infra is incredibly expensive and countries like Ethiopia have too little of it as it is. Check out the footage linked below and where and when there is electrical infra. I wouldn't be surprised if there are large areas in Ethiopia where there is no grid at all. First things that get bought when electricity becomes available: refrigerators, televisions. Mobile phones + solar panel chargers are commonplace even where there is no grid. That's a whole industry in Africa. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfvjtb17uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfvjtb17uE EV charging: forget about it. Only in the biggest cities.
- grecy 3y ago
  > I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the world, in fact out of 195 ranked countries Ethiopia is 189th (tied with Burundi, and just ahead of CAR, the DRC, Somalia and Sudan). These are the kind of conclusions you can get yourself into just from reading numbers on screens when you've never actually set foot in a place and experienced reality. I drove across Ethiopia in early 2019, from a remote border on Lake Turkana into Addis, down into Djibouti, back into Ethiopia and then north into Sudan. I assure you, there is a HUGE number of ICE vehicles and infrastructure for them. Traffic and parking in Addis Abba is a real thing. Here's some footage of me driving in the city so you can see what it is really like https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418 https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Incredible footage. Your trip is the kind of thing that a few hundred years ago would result in some kind of epic story told from one generation to another.
    - grecy 3y ago
      Haha, thanks. Some days I kick myself for not doing a better job filming the trip so I could put together a proper documentary, and some days I think I should just do it anyway with the footage I have. I'm also really happy I often just put the cameras away and experienced the place I was in and talked with people. That was the point, after all.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That last part is the reason I hardly have any pictures of my own trips. I'm just too busy to be making pictures all the time and I don't want to be the 'cameraman'. It also tends to immediately mark you as a tourist (though in Ethiopia you would be marked as a tourist anyway but I have never been there). Some of the most amazing sights I've seen were in Colombia and even if I regret not having pictures I have them in my head and that's good enough. But your trip and your footage are on a different level and I think just as an unadorned record it has immense value.
- graemep 3y ago
  This sounds like Sri Lanka's ban on fertilizer, pesticide etc. imports the then govt sold as a switch to organic, but was just a short term saving of foreign exchange that was disastrous within an year.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
csmpltn 3y ago
What "begins"? Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight... is banning internal combustion cars... and this is supposed to indicate newsworthy progress? This is a land where large parts of the population are living in extreme poverty, living on the brink of starvation, with extremely limited access to food or water or basic infrastructure. They should be the last country to ban internal combustion cars...
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  And yet they're leading the world on a policy issue that nearly every person in rich, developed nations has in their top 10 most urgent concerns. Galling isn't it?
  - sentientslug 3y ago
    .
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      How could you possibly know anything about me and struggle? Spoken like a presumptuous upstart.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    This sounds like a tropical country banning oil&gas heating in winter.
  - csmpltn 3y ago
    I think you need to be told this in a very direct manner, so I'll take a stab at it: this is a country where the vast majority of the population can't shit down anything resembling a toilet, let alone wash their hands after they are done, because there's no infrastructure to support any of that. Forget stable and predictable access to food, or water, or medicine, or education. Compared to anything in the west - this country is in complete shambles, and their population is poor and is severely disadvantaged. You're sitting here celebrating what exactly? Their continued descent into eternal poverty and de-industrialization? Most people over there have a shit standard of living, but people like you are sitting here and celebrating that?
forinti 3y ago
Ethiopia has just finished filling the GERD (Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam). They have lots of new power to play with. They're currently at 750MW and it will eventually reach 5.15GW. Oil, OTOH, they don't have.
- photonbeam 3y ago
  and they have sun at a good angle for solar
RecycledEle 3y ago
Ethiopia has many problems, but I do not think pollution from ICE engines is their biggest one. If it is a big problem, catalytic converters (including used ones) and mufflers would help.
- geek_at 3y ago
  It's not the pollution, it's that they have enough sun for solar, enough energy from a 5mw dam, but what they don't have is oil. So it does make sense for them to go electric
strickman 3y ago
This is going to sideline dozens of automobiles. What effect will this have on Ethiopia's industrial production capacity, upon which the rest of the world depends?
- MiguelX413 3y ago
  In what ways does the rest of the world depend on Ethiopia's industrial production capacity?
PedroBatista 3y ago
I'll try to be as nice as possible: Are internal combustion cars one of the main cause of Ethiopia's problems? Let's pretend all-electric cars are the solution and nothing else for a moment, these transitions require an immense allocation of resources, so either they are swimming in money or ICE is their main problem... or their politicians are out of their fucking minds. As in 20 years ago with the whole "cloud computing" thing, the "EVs are green and we must ban ICE now" is a very strong marketing campaign and cannot be reversed because above all people don't like to be wrong and someone saying "EVs will solve nothing other than your superficial perception of being environmentally friendly is" might as well tell them to f themselves. Remember kids: only a fraction of the World's population can afford to play these urban upper middle class games.
- riffraff 3y ago
  They have electricity and don't have oil, so presumably they feel they can just switch over and actually gain something. Bangladesh was the first country to ban plastic bags because (iirc) they actually caused problems with sewers, so it wouldn't be the first case when environmental friendly policies are also just good policies.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  EVs are greener, both in the sense of reducing carbon emissions and in terms of reducing the pollution we suffer on a daily basis. Future generations will regard the ICE with the same horror as drinking unclean water. If you do not understand this, in spite of all the evidence presented to you, then I suspect you are suffering from motivated reasoning. Only a fraction of the world's population will be able to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
CrypticShift 3y ago
The article does not discuss two-wheelers, although I assume they are included (?). Can one imagine a ban imposed solely on internal combustion motorcycles ? Could this be a simpler first step for populous third-world countries? I mean, they are quite popular there (= real impact), while also being much cheaper (= easier to replace).
nujabe 3y ago
This is just smoke screen, there might not be an Ethiopia in a few years, the country has been in turmoil for years now and spiralling to collapse. Just yesterday they announced a state of emergency yesterday in the Amhara region, militias that were used by the government to crush the Tigray rebellion in a 2 year civil war are now themselves refusing to put down arms. Other regions are also seeing rebellion. To sell the public that he achieved the dream of giving Ethiopia “access to sea”(which they already have access to) they recently announced an illegal deal with a rebel region from a neighbouring country (Somalia) where they annexed some land for a military base in exchange for “recognition” which is causing a lot of conflict in the region. From how things are going there likely will not be an Ethiopia in 2 years time but 4-5 separate countries.
- grecy 3y ago
  > To sell the public that he achieved the dream of giving Ethiopia “access to sea”(which they already have access to) When I was there Ethiopia being landlocked was a huge problem and expensive situation (I watched thousands and thousands of trucks driving overland from the big new Chinese port in Djibouti City. How exactly does Ethiopia have access to the sea?
  - nujabe 3y ago
    > “The question is not will Ethiopia access the sea. We want Ethiopia to have access to the sea, there is no question about that,” Mohamud said, adding that the federal government was ready to negotiate a deal with Addis Ababa. “But grabbing a piece of land, we are not ready for that.” - President of Somalia https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/1/23/dont-do-it-somali- https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/1/23/dont-do-it-soma... president-warns-ethiopia-against-somaliland-port-deal The UAE (and later the UK) invested in a major trade corridor and investment in a port in the region, initially Somalia rejected it but later agreed after UAE negotiated with the government. Ethiopia has access to a major port in the region, in fact they own 20% of the DP world project. What they want is access to sea not for commercial reasons but for military reasons. You don’t need 20km of land for a port.
rgmerk 3y ago
Dunno about Ethiopia, but I expect some of the smaller island states will start to do away with ICE vehicles pretty soon. I visited Vanuatu recently. Everything imported is very expensive because of shipping costs, including fuel. The longest drive you can do in the country is about 60km. Everybody drives slowly. There is no winter where solar power is unavailable. Cheap Chinese EVs and solar power are a complete no brainer there.
vcg3rd 3y ago
I assume they've set up lots of reliable, accessible charging stations everywhere? Befuddles me that EVs are manufactured and marketed before the infrastructure exist. It's like everyone in Butte, MT buying ICE vehicles in 1910 before any gas stations opened in the area.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  EVs only really need a basic energy grid, charging stations are just a bonus. Much easier and better to build the grid that you're going to need anyways than burning dinosaurs.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Oh dear. The tones of racism, victim blaming and odious incivility in this thread is really not befitting Hacker News. Shame on everyone, including myself for bothering to try.

69 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the world, in fact out of 195 ranked countries Ethiopia is 189th (tied with Burundi, and just ahead of CAR, the DRC, Somalia and Sudan). Even given that however, as the article states there simply isn't a charging infrastructure to support a shift to electric. More, this sounds like it's largely motivated by economic factors: > "Ethiopian here. Main reason for this is the fact that it's currently struggling with a severe foreign exchange shortage, affecting its ability to import oil and other commodities. Aside from this surprising announcement, lack of foreign currency has also led to a significant push towards enhancing its agricultural productivity and boosting its local production of light manufactured goods." It's hard to imagine how that's going to square with a nationwide charging network for the 1.2 million vehicle owners out of 128 million Ethiopians. citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_motor_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

ttfkam 3y ago
Given one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles, it likely also lacks petroleum infrastructure as well. You don't make a huge number of gas stations when there aren't many cars. If given the choice of building up a transportation infrastructure based on hydrocarbons only to be torn down as the world moves toward electrification versus fast tracking your electrical grid, the latter seems an obvious choice. With the decline in solar prices, it allows for greater decentralization in that infrastructure. Solar ends up a (relative) one-time purchase. Oil is a constant importation drain on your economy. It's cell phones all over again, skipping over the landline step. Why string phone cables to every home when you can just concentrate on a relative few cell towers?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  All great points between your comment and the one that you replied to. What’s really exciting is that every country has electrical infrastructure practitioners: electricians, linemen, etc, so the roll out of charging infra can be done very rapidly with proper training and resourcing. It also probably helps that China isn’t yet importing EVs to the developed world at scale, so all of those EVs built beyond domestic consumption will be shipped to places like Ethiopia. Mass produced Chinese EVs speeding the death of combustion vehicles in the developing world seems like a net win.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > electricians, linemen, etc, so the roll out of charging infra can be done very rapidly with proper training and resourcing. Not really, the electricians and the linemen are busy with maintenance, to roll out more infra you need a massive influx of capital.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Savings from fossil fuel costs? Investing in electrical infra delivers returns from deprecating ongoing fossil consumption and associated spend.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That would be a trickle compared to what is required. HV power infra is incredibly expensive and countries like Ethiopia have too little of it as it is. Check out the footage linked below and where and when there is electrical infra. I wouldn't be surprised if there are large areas in Ethiopia where there is no grid at all. First things that get bought when electricity becomes available: refrigerators, televisions. Mobile phones + solar panel chargers are commonplace even where there is no grid. That's a whole industry in Africa. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfvjtb17uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfvjtb17uE EV charging: forget about it. Only in the biggest cities.
grecy 3y ago
> I can imagine that will be somewhat easier in Ethiopia than in many other countries. Ethiopia has one of the lowest per capita number of motor vehicles in the world, in fact out of 195 ranked countries Ethiopia is 189th (tied with Burundi, and just ahead of CAR, the DRC, Somalia and Sudan). These are the kind of conclusions you can get yourself into just from reading numbers on screens when you've never actually set foot in a place and experienced reality. I drove across Ethiopia in early 2019, from a remote border on Lake Turkana into Addis, down into Djibouti, back into Ethiopia and then north into Sudan. I assure you, there is a HUGE number of ICE vehicles and infrastructure for them. Traffic and parking in Addis Abba is a real thing. Here's some footage of me driving in the city so you can see what it is really like https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418 https://youtu.be/hPVuc1of4XI?t=418
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Incredible footage. Your trip is the kind of thing that a few hundred years ago would result in some kind of epic story told from one generation to another.
  - grecy 3y ago
    Haha, thanks. Some days I kick myself for not doing a better job filming the trip so I could put together a proper documentary, and some days I think I should just do it anyway with the footage I have. I'm also really happy I often just put the cameras away and experienced the place I was in and talked with people. That was the point, after all.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That last part is the reason I hardly have any pictures of my own trips. I'm just too busy to be making pictures all the time and I don't want to be the 'cameraman'. It also tends to immediately mark you as a tourist (though in Ethiopia you would be marked as a tourist anyway but I have never been there). Some of the most amazing sights I've seen were in Colombia and even if I regret not having pictures I have them in my head and that's good enough. But your trip and your footage are on a different level and I think just as an unadorned record it has immense value.
graemep 3y ago
This sounds like Sri Lanka's ban on fertilizer, pesticide etc. imports the then govt sold as a switch to organic, but was just a short term saving of foreign exchange that was disastrous within an year.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

csmpltn 3y ago

What "begins"? Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight... is banning internal combustion cars... and this is supposed to indicate newsworthy progress? This is a land where large parts of the population are living in extreme poverty, living on the brink of starvation, with extremely limited access to food or water or basic infrastructure. They should be the last country to ban internal combustion cars...

nonrandomstring 3y ago
And yet they're leading the world on a policy issue that nearly every person in rich, developed nations has in their top 10 most urgent concerns. Galling isn't it?
- sentientslug 3y ago
  .
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    How could you possibly know anything about me and struggle? Spoken like a presumptuous upstart.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  This sounds like a tropical country banning oil&gas heating in winter.
- csmpltn 3y ago
  I think you need to be told this in a very direct manner, so I'll take a stab at it: this is a country where the vast majority of the population can't shit down anything resembling a toilet, let alone wash their hands after they are done, because there's no infrastructure to support any of that. Forget stable and predictable access to food, or water, or medicine, or education. Compared to anything in the west - this country is in complete shambles, and their population is poor and is severely disadvantaged. You're sitting here celebrating what exactly? Their continued descent into eternal poverty and de-industrialization? Most people over there have a shit standard of living, but people like you are sitting here and celebrating that?

forinti 3y ago

Ethiopia has just finished filling the GERD (Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam). They have lots of new power to play with. They're currently at 750MW and it will eventually reach 5.15GW. Oil, OTOH, they don't have.

photonbeam 3y ago
and they have sun at a good angle for solar

RecycledEle 3y ago

Ethiopia has many problems, but I do not think pollution from ICE engines is their biggest one. If it is a big problem, catalytic converters (including used ones) and mufflers would help.

geek_at 3y ago
It's not the pollution, it's that they have enough sun for solar, enough energy from a 5mw dam, but what they don't have is oil. So it does make sense for them to go electric

strickman 3y ago

This is going to sideline dozens of automobiles. What effect will this have on Ethiopia's industrial production capacity, upon which the rest of the world depends?

MiguelX413 3y ago
In what ways does the rest of the world depend on Ethiopia's industrial production capacity?

PedroBatista 3y ago

I'll try to be as nice as possible: Are internal combustion cars one of the main cause of Ethiopia's problems? Let's pretend all-electric cars are the solution and nothing else for a moment, these transitions require an immense allocation of resources, so either they are swimming in money or ICE is their main problem... or their politicians are out of their fucking minds. As in 20 years ago with the whole "cloud computing" thing, the "EVs are green and we must ban ICE now" is a very strong marketing campaign and cannot be reversed because above all people don't like to be wrong and someone saying "EVs will solve nothing other than your superficial perception of being environmentally friendly is" might as well tell them to f themselves. Remember kids: only a fraction of the World's population can afford to play these urban upper middle class games.

riffraff 3y ago
They have electricity and don't have oil, so presumably they feel they can just switch over and actually gain something. Bangladesh was the first country to ban plastic bags because (iirc) they actually caused problems with sewers, so it wouldn't be the first case when environmental friendly policies are also just good policies.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
EVs are greener, both in the sense of reducing carbon emissions and in terms of reducing the pollution we suffer on a daily basis. Future generations will regard the ICE with the same horror as drinking unclean water. If you do not understand this, in spite of all the evidence presented to you, then I suspect you are suffering from motivated reasoning. Only a fraction of the world's population will be able to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

CrypticShift 3y ago

The article does not discuss two-wheelers, although I assume they are included (?). Can one imagine a ban imposed solely on internal combustion motorcycles ? Could this be a simpler first step for populous third-world countries? I mean, they are quite popular there (= real impact), while also being much cheaper (= easier to replace).

nujabe 3y ago

This is just smoke screen, there might not be an Ethiopia in a few years, the country has been in turmoil for years now and spiralling to collapse. Just yesterday they announced a state of emergency yesterday in the Amhara region, militias that were used by the government to crush the Tigray rebellion in a 2 year civil war are now themselves refusing to put down arms. Other regions are also seeing rebellion. To sell the public that he achieved the dream of giving Ethiopia “access to sea”(which they already have access to) they recently announced an illegal deal with a rebel region from a neighbouring country (Somalia) where they annexed some land for a military base in exchange for “recognition” which is causing a lot of conflict in the region. From how things are going there likely will not be an Ethiopia in 2 years time but 4-5 separate countries.

grecy 3y ago
> To sell the public that he achieved the dream of giving Ethiopia “access to sea”(which they already have access to) When I was there Ethiopia being landlocked was a huge problem and expensive situation (I watched thousands and thousands of trucks driving overland from the big new Chinese port in Djibouti City. How exactly does Ethiopia have access to the sea?
- nujabe 3y ago
  > “The question is not will Ethiopia access the sea. We want Ethiopia to have access to the sea, there is no question about that,” Mohamud said, adding that the federal government was ready to negotiate a deal with Addis Ababa. “But grabbing a piece of land, we are not ready for that.” - President of Somalia https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/1/23/dont-do-it-somali- https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/1/23/dont-do-it-soma... president-warns-ethiopia-against-somaliland-port-deal The UAE (and later the UK) invested in a major trade corridor and investment in a port in the region, initially Somalia rejected it but later agreed after UAE negotiated with the government. Ethiopia has access to a major port in the region, in fact they own 20% of the DP world project. What they want is access to sea not for commercial reasons but for military reasons. You don’t need 20km of land for a port.

rgmerk 3y ago

Dunno about Ethiopia, but I expect some of the smaller island states will start to do away with ICE vehicles pretty soon. I visited Vanuatu recently. Everything imported is very expensive because of shipping costs, including fuel. The longest drive you can do in the country is about 60km. Everybody drives slowly. There is no winter where solar power is unavailable. Cheap Chinese EVs and solar power are a complete no brainer there.

vcg3rd 3y ago

I assume they've set up lots of reliable, accessible charging stations everywhere? Befuddles me that EVs are manufactured and marketed before the infrastructure exist. It's like everyone in Butte, MT buying ICE vehicles in 1910 before any gas stations opened in the area.

gaganyaan 3y ago
EVs only really need a basic energy grid, charging stations are just a bonus. Much easier and better to build the grid that you're going to need anyways than burning dinosaurs.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Oh dear. The tones of racism, victim blaming and odious incivility in this thread is really not befitting Hacker News. Shame on everyone, including myself for bothering to try.