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...
> “Ethiopia, barely a country, torn by civil war, without a shred of functional infrastructure anywhere in sight”
Look up some pictures of Addis Ababa. It’s probably not what you expect.
The regional differences within Ethiopia are very large. One way to grasp the scale is to look at UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings.
The poorest Ethiopian regions have an HDI score around 0.44 [1] while Addis Ababa reaches 0.74. That’s higher than many Mexican states.
For comparison, Mississippi has a HDI rating of 0.866. By this metric, life in the Ethiopian capital is much closer to living in the poorest American state than to living in other parts of Ethiopia. They have stable power, cars, highways, office towers, malls, and the rest of developed infrastructure.
Of course a country’s capital will always be relatively developed. But Addis Ababa contains less than 5% of Ethiopia’s population…the majority live in horrible conditions.
Six million of them living in a relatively developed environment seems like pretty clear evidence against the claim that it’s “barely a country” and “without a shred of infrastructure.”
It begunstiget because you now have countries on both sides of the economic scale pushing to ban them. Norway being on the other side of the spectrum.
EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be.
So EVs start to eat at the ICE market from both sides of the spectrum. It’s like cell phones vs land lines all over again. Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with.
> EVs could be hugely beneficial to developing countries as it’s a path to energy independence, and with cheap LiFePo batteries there’s a path to make EVs much cheaper than ICE could ever be.
Everything tends to be "coulda shoulda woulda" when it comes to EVs..
If that's the case, then they wouldn't even need to ban anything, the benefits and the market would be so obvious, poor people obviously would buy EVs.
To be clear, I kinda agree with your statement, but then don't wasted the little resources you have chasing a big dream constructed by other people who you don't owe anything. Wait it out.
> "Norway being on the other side of the spectrum."
I suggest you follow the public debate around EVs in Norway, especially with regards to their performance this winter.
The public transportation system (which has largely transitioned to EV-only fleets) has collapsed completely and come under severe pressure to roll back to fossilized vehicles.
There's a growing pressure to reverse the push for using EVs everywhere, since the technology just doesn't seem to hold up to the weather conditions. Electric busses, taxis, trains and ferries have all underperformed, broke down, and brought Norway's largest cities to a halt on plenty of occasions this winter.
Outside of the large metropolitans, in the rural parts of the country - nobody uses EVs because they're completely impractical. People just can't risk running out of battery when it's -25 Celsius outside and the nearest charging station is an hour's drive away. EVs are heavier to drive up icy and snowy roads, and often get stuck in such conditions.
The busses in Oslo are driving without air conditioning, even when it's freezing outside, to preserve battery power.
People in the large metropolitans are now regularly being asked by the authorities to just stay at home and not go to work due to public transportation systems collapsing completely under the slightest snowfall or rainfall.
There's another debate in Norway about the severe lack of EV charging infrastructure. Coupled with the doubling of electricity prices this past year and the economic downturn - the public discourse has turned on the rapid adoption of EVs.
> "Many poor countries never even built land lines and leapfrogged straight to cell phones even though that was the more expensive technology to start with."
Cellular technology requires much less infrastructure to set-up and maintain (as opposed to land-lines).
EVs are the complete opposite. They require charging infrastructure everywhere. You need to connect the entire country to a reliable electric grid, and spread charging stations everywhere.
It's the complete opposite analogy to the deprecation of analog telephony...
As opposed to electricity - fuel can be easily transported and stored around the country in numerous ways... you can transport fuel with donkeys, trucks, trains, cars, jugs, bottles...
Huh? Do you mean public transport trains like trams? Because trains do not have batteries because they have an overhead line or a 3rd rail to deliver the current.
Are you confusing Sudan with the moon? I spent a month teaching at the university of Khartoum, and another couple of weeks travelling around the country, and Sudan has working infrastructure that is only inhibited by sanctions.
Yes. China has had very close relationships with Africa for years. Super discounted or free infrastructure for oil. I can totally see BYD/Xpeng/etc. being huge enough to support this ban.
That sounds like the best place to start: cars are the most expensive form of transportation, an order of magnitude greater emissions (even EVs), and have massive negative externalities affecting the surrounding communities regardless of power source. If you haven’t made the mistake of building your society around them, it’s much cheaper not to start and then need to deal with the painful disruption of redesigning your transportation network in a decade.
Barely a country? Without a shred of infrastructure?
You haven't been to Ethiopia, or learned about its history, clearly.
Ethiopia is not only very much a country (with that name since 330 AD), but one orders of magnitude older and more deeply rooted in human history than, for example, the USA. The earliest known hominid archealogical evidence is from Ethiopia (circa 4 million years ago). It's the only African nation not to be colonised by genocidal Europeans. Haile Salassie - former emperor of Ethiopia - led the country to victory over fascism, and changed the direction of Euro-African relations, and is revered in the Rastafarian religion. This barely scratches the surface of how worthy of your attention Ethiopia is.
That was merciful. You went easy on that guy, mentioning only items of cultural and religious significance. Next time hit him with the big guns - Ethiopian contributions to theoretical physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, philosophy, industry, computer science, and pure mathematics.
To be fair, it can have a gigantic culture, have been super influential historically, scientifically, and culturally speaking with smart, educated people... and still be completely in ruins and have 0 ways to actually enforce any rule of law. Syria for example, is exactly like that.
All those so-called contributions, yet they can’t save themselves from a $925 GDP per capita and 69% of people being classified as “multidimensionally poor” [1].
Ethiopia is a typical useless African nation marred by excessive corruption and mindless tribalism.
I wonder if Ethiopians can also survive by giving up all the elements invented in the Western and Asian world…they can’t.
Ethiopians inventing a few things here and there is of no use if it’s a country where the majority lives in poverty because of corruption and violence caused by brainless tribalism.
Typical excuse for African nations run by morons elected by an equally moronic populace.
Many formerly colonized countries achieved unprecedented levels of success.
But in Africa where corruption and tribal violence is hindering development, the foolish kleptocrats running the show always try to hoodwink their population by blaming long dead and gone colonialist powers.
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?
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?
Oh sweet baby Jesus, please do be civil sir. I can almost feel you
popping a vein getting into a pompous flap over someone challenging
your parochial world view.
Here's an example I have first hand experience with.
Portugal was often considered the "poor man of Europe". When I was
there at the end of the last century it was almost impossible to get
reliable communication without a satellite phone. I was stuck out in
the mountains where nobody could afford a telephone since the cost of
having copper run over 10km was too much even if the whole village
clubbed together.
I returned to London and thought rather little of it for years until I
spoke to a family member there who said, I'll just email you some
photos over. Seconds later my inbox was filled with hi-res jpegs.
This must be costing you a fortune, I said, thinking of the old
satphone. No, we're using the new dish!
In Portugal, between 1999 and 2004, using a big EU development grant,
most of the "poor south" went from having no telecoms at all to having
some of the finest and cheapest in Europe. It was perfect for new LOS
microwave links that meshed across the country. In fact, without a
legacy of copper providers to wrestle with, the transition was cheaper
and smoother.
It's called "leapfrogging", which is a concept used in economics and
business to describe rapid growth that bypasses stages assumed to be
necessary, see Schumpeter, Stiglitz and Tirole and [0]
I do know a little something of what Ethiopia is like from people
who've served or lived there - so the lecture from someone who
probably can't find it on a map is a tad tedious. As I understand it's
a beautiful and fertile place, sadly torn by endless war.
Anyway, you may know that African countries are leapfrogging at an
astonishing rate, often spurred by Chinese investment. Indeed their
"disadvantage" may be their greatest advantage, of not being under the
heel of Western interests. They don't need to go through the
environmentally devastating process of petrochemical industrialism if
they can just go straight to a post-petro economy.
Now if you've got something civil and interesting to say about Chinese
investment, what that might mean I'd love to hear. But all said,
hats-off to them.
Since you mentioned Portugal: I was there (northern part, only as far south as Porto) in 1995 or so. It's the only place I've ever seen oxcarts on the road. I didn't have a cell phone so I don't know about phone service.
It was a very nice country and I'd love to go back, but it's still the "poor south" of Europe.
Maybe you can "leapfrog" on phone service, but there's no modernist replacement for clean water, sewage disposal, and reliable electric power.
Unfortunately, the lack the industriousness of the Chinese people is certain to hinder the velocity of innovation we'd see with a purely Ethiopian effort. People don't eschew the "Made in China" label without reason. With hand tools for example, I started with Chinese made Harbor Freight in my 20's, German in my 30's, now it's either Ethiopian tools or "I'm not doing this project".
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.
> 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.
> “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
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.
Soooo, they have access to the ocean through a deal with Somalia... which like all landlocked countries is only as good as the current deal maker makes it.. and will cost them.
Soooo, they don't have "access to the ocean" in any way differently than they ever have, or any other landlocked country has ever had. Gotcha.
You talk as if being land locked is an economic death knell, Ethiopia is not the only country in the world (yet a lone region - which there are many) that is landlocked. This land for recognition isn’t going to solve truck congestion in Ethiopia. If they were interested in solving that they would’ve helped finance a rail line from Berbera to Addis, but as I mentioned Ethiopian PM is interested in selling to an uninterested public the deal of Ethiopia with a navy.
I didn't say it was a death knell, lay off the strawman.
Clearly it is an economic burden, as evidenced by every landlocked country ever.
While I was there the massive new rail line had just started service. I thought the plan was for it to extend all the way to the monster Chinese port in Djibouti?
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.
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?
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.
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:
Remember, these grids are already running 220v and the average labor cost is very low. There are many use cases that make sense within said economy with cheap range limited electric vehicles that do not support fast charging.
The calculus changes quite substantially when you are paying people tens of dollars an hour, but it is common in Ethiopia for people to spend nearly half of their income on the cost of commuting to work as wages are so low.
Or they could go the route of Aptera-style vehicles as long as they stay within 65km/day. The only infrastructure you'd need is roads. Prices will only go down from here.
https://youtu.be/0PU4DQoQAWY?si=pxvFKe67jAw_0lOe
> 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
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.
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.
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.
The way this squares up is that the protein of the population that is urbanized is very low compared to many other countries. In lots of African cities the road infrastructure is underbuilt for the amount of usage, but also there's just a lot more people still not living in urban areas. A good short hand for this is proportion of the country that works in agriculture. It's about 66% for Ethiopia (according to first hit in Google search), compared to about 2% for the US. Lots of those Ethiopian ag workers are going to be subsistence farmers, probably using animals where the us would use tractors, and public transport for personal transit and moving extra goods to market.
It'll be interesting to hear how they plan to handle freight and public transport (buses/matatus).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...