Driving an electric vehicle requires much more than just the will to do so and the financial means to do so, because there is another determining factor: the availability of recharging infrastructure. In Ivory Coast, where electromobility is beginning to be seen as an alternative to polluting transport, the town of Bouaké has just installed its first charging point for electric vehicles.
The system has been installed in front of a hotel popular with expatriates and the Ivorian middle class. This is no mean feat, as the initiative comes just a few weeks after the official arrival of cars made by Chinese carmaker Build Your Dreams (BYD) in Ivorian showrooms. This is part of a strategy by Loxea, a CFAO Group subsidiary, to diversify its sales fleet (internal combustion and electric vehicles).
The new charging point developed by EV.Tech was inaugurated as part of the “Durability Tour” event on green mobility. “We had the opportunity to test the destination charging service offered by the NEO network, with the participation of three electric vehicles from Abidjan: two BYD ATTO 3s from Loxea and a Tesla Model Y kindly loaned by our partner UrbanCOD for the occasion”, explains Florent Thomas, EV.Tech’s Managing Director. An opinion shared by Andy Costa, appointed BYD ambassador.
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For his part, Ivory Coast’s Minister of Transport Amadou Koné said that this infrastructure was a concrete response to the process of “improving air quality, as the government of Ivory Coast wishes to do”. As proof of this, the country of elephants is one of the few in West Africa to have set up an Agency for the Promotion of Electric Mobility (Apeme), which encourages the private sector. It is in this context that the start-up Auto24 installed a charging point in 2023 in the council of Treichville.
Benoit-Ivan Wansi