Nigerian Mobility Company Deploys Electric Motorcyles, is Nigeria Ready?

Nigerian mobility company, MAX has launched its electric motorcycles into the Nigerian market. The new vehicles, called the MAX E Series, have been under development for the last two years. The business has now unveiled the latest vehicles in Ogun State’s Gbamu Gbamu community in South West Nigeria, after a testing phase.

MAX first disclosed its plans for electric mobility in June 2019, and unveiled the actual design and specification of the vehicle by November 2019, naming it the MAX E Series M1. Now the newly introduced EV is the MAX E M2 series, a more performance-enhanced model.

“We’ve been on a product development journey at MAX over the last five years looking at how we could transform mobility across market segments, across vehicle configurations, and we looked at how we could leapfrog combustion engines to electric-powered mobility,” Adetayo Bamiduro, MAX’s CEO said

“The new announcement is a milestone in terms of our journey to leading and pioneering that transformation,” he added.

Metro Africa Express (MAX) was founded in 2015, and is the pioneer of bike hailing in Nigeria inspired by the Grab and Go-Jek of South Asia. Until introducing passenger transport by 2017 the business began as a motorcycle-based logistics operation. It has since gained traction in Lagos and later spread to a few other cities throughout the region.

It raised a total of $7 million in funding by equity and grants to scale up its mobility solutions by June 2019. Bertrand Njoya, Chief Financial Officer of MAX, disclosed that the company had been collaborating with different partners to bring electric vehicles into the Nigerian market.

The company is looking to mass-produce these vehicles with the recent launch and rollout of the MAX E series and is targeting thousands over the next 12-18 months.

While the company said this is the first indigenously produced electric motorcycle, it is collaborating with Asian and European partners including Japan’s Yamaha and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

The manufacturer said MAX E Series has a battery cycle of 1,500 and could be operating as high as 60 km per hour. At the other hand, the latest E Series M2 is much faster, reaching a speed of 85 km per hour with a battery guarantee of over 2,000 cycles. The charge time for the M2 is, on average, four hours. The new EVs would cost about $1,500, comparable to those of other manufacturers of electric vehicles.

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MAX said it has reached agreements with numerous organisations to install electric vehicle battery swapping stations, including retailers, energy providers and real estate firms. This will boost access and have a comparable or superior experience to petrol/gas stations.

“We’re excited about the role we’re playing in deploying these vehicles and making them accessible both in rural and urban contexts as well,” Bamiduro told TechCabal in an interview.

The company predicts there will be 100 million motorcycle units in Africa by 2030. MAX says it aims to play a very important role in lowering carbon emissions and minimizing the harmful effect of combustion engines on our climate by rolling out electric vehicles now.

Is Nigeria ready?

MAX ‘s contribution to electric vehicles is an significant one, more so because Nigeria has been lax regarding environmental and ecological issues. However the pressing questions are: Is there an electric vehicle market in Nigeria, and are there customers in Nigeria who can afford EVs that appear to be more costly than petrol-powered alternatives?

Bamiduro says, yes.

“There is strong demand than people realise,” he added. “Africans are very early adopters of innovative technology, [so] it’s not a question of desire or interest from our people, it’s a question of access; a question of whether someone can bring it to them,” he explains to TechCabal.

“From all the research, interviews and pilots we’ve done, there is no question about it. There is a massive demand for electric mobility. The question is who would provide the infrastructure to meet that demand.”

MAX believes it can solve this access problem and is targeting different customers including private individuals, commercial motorcycle operators and other institutions including the government.

To bridge the access gap, MAX is adopting an innovative financing model. This would reduce the upfront cost of acquiring the new electric vehicles.

MAX claims it can address this access issue and is targeting different customers including private individuals, commercial motorcycle operators and other organizations like the government.

MAX is implementing an innovative funding model to close the access gap. This will reduce the total cost of buying the new electric vehicles.