Coming to Rwanda: VW bringing e-Golf cars for ride-hailing system

Posted on : Wednesday , 27th November 2019

Volkswagen is introducing a batch of electric-powered varieties of its Golf hatchback car to Rwanda for a local ride-hailing service, launching a bridgehead in the country that it hopes to expand to other nations, as it seeks to upsurge market share globally.

Thomas Schaefer a managing director for VW in Africa, told the Reuters news agency, "We've been investing more than $30 billion into new electric vehicles and platforms and the entire world is advancing in that direction,", "The plan for Africa is that eventually, we change the whole fleet into electric."

Trading in the vehicles into Rwanda, which sells itself to foreign investors by advertising its reliable infrastructure, permanency and relative simplicity of doing business. And which is a place where VW already amasses cars, is initially envisioned to test its infrastructure and performance in the region's type of weather.

Volkswagen, which has a global objective of manufacturing 1 million electric cars a year by 2022, is opening small in Kigali. Introducing 50 e-Golf models in the first few months. The vehicles combustion engine cars altered to run on electricity, will be incorporated into the company's app-driven Move Service, which was launched last December.

German Power Equipment Firm Siemens will construct fifteen charging stations in Kigali. This stations can charge up to 80% of a car's battery within an hour. Whereas, it takes around 11 hours to charge a car at home, stated Andile Dlamini, one of VW communications officers.

VW's new ID3 models which is going to be launched next year will have a range of 600km (373 miles). The e-Golf's range when fully charged, is up to 230km (143 miles).

 Unlike other nations in Africa, Rwanda claims electricity that is comparatively reliable. Rwanda now has an installed power generation capacity of about 286 megawatts, and the cars would mostly charge at night, when there is surplus of power.

Rwanda's Prime Minister, Edouard Ngirente, mentioned he anticipated electric car use could increase, remarking that fuel merchandises were Rwanda's chief import last year.

Schaefer stated, "The Rwandan Government is functioning on electric vehicle policy, and if the policy favors electric cars over traditional ones, then that growth can occur very fast.