Egypt Seeks to Build $20,000 Electric Vehicles in Green Push

Tawfik said Egypt’s electric model, to be named either E70 or A70, will sell for around $20,000, with half of buyers probably taxi or Uber drivers. That’s roughly the same price as Europe’s cheapest EV, Renault’s made-in-China Dacia Spring.

The private sector will also be offered a 40% role in a new company established to operate pay-to-use charging stations, with 10% being taken by El Nasr and the remaining half by a “state entity,” Tawfik said, without elaborating. The first wave of 3,000 charging points will be around the cities of Cairo and Alexandria before they’re introduced elsewhere.

“Egypt now produces all kinds of clean energy,” the minister said, citing the country’s sizeable wind and solar power projects. “This means we have the infrastructure to leap into the future with the automotive industry.”

It’s an ambitious undertaking for the Arab world’s most populous nation of more than 100 million people, where Tawfik estimates only about 350 electric cars are plying the busy streets. That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly 5 million private cars registered, although financial incentives offered to owners of standard cars to convert them to natural gas will also be extended to EVs to encourage purchases. 

Changing Region
The picture is similar in the broader Mideast region, much of which relies on oil wealth, where the adoption of EVs has been dwarfed by their growth in China, the U.S. and Europe. It’s beginning to change, though, with Saudi Arabia planning to manufacture its own.

Brightskies Inc., an Egyptian company, has also signed a deal with state-owned Engineering Automotive Manufacturing Co. to develop and manufacture electric buses and minibuses from 2022, according to Tawfik. Egypt will also look at making hydrogen-powered EVs in the longer term, he said.

The initiatives come as Egypt prepares to host the COP27 climate summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh next year and ramps up its production of green energy. About 8.6% of the North African nation’s electricity comes from renewables, with a target of 20% by 2022 and more than doubling that by 2035.

El Nasr dates back to Egypt’s socialist 1960s and once assembled local versions of Fiats among other models. It halted production in 2009, only to be reopened a few years later. 

Egypt signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s Dongfeng Motor Co. in early 2021 to build EVs, but it expired and wasn’t renewed, Tawfik said, without giving more details.