Science & Technology Archives - The World from PRX

Science & Technology Archives - The World from PRX episodes

April 29 The latest in the world of robotics
Robot news has been coming fast and furious this month. One robot won a half-marathon in Beijing. Others captured a Russian position on the battlefield in Ukraine. And last week, we learned of a robotic arm that beat table tennis champions at their own game.
That example in particular showcases a new ability to react and adapt to an unpredictable world in real time. To dig deeper into the matter, The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler spoke with Kenechukwu Mbanisi, an assistant professor of robotics engineering at Olin College in Massachusetts. He said this latest advance in robotics is impressive for several reasons.
“It is definitely a super cool factor,” Mbanisi said, “but beyond the cool factor, it demonstrates that robots can interact in the physical world in ways that humans can, and not just humans, but elite humans with very high levels of skill and capabilities. So, that’s very exciting.”
The winner of the humanoid robot half-marathon from Honor is chased by journalists after a press conference at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on the outskirts of Beijing, April. 19, 2026. Andy Wong/AP Photo
Carolyn Beeler: Tell me more about that, interacting with humans. I understand that something that’s hard about robotics is getting robots to react properly when something unpredictable happens. Is that kind of the crux of why this is so interesting, this table tennis example?Kenechukwu Mbanisi: Yes. So, I’ll say that what makes this particularly exciting is that this demonstrates the capability of robots to learn a very specialized skill that takes people decades to master. And that requires very fast reaction times, you know, table tennis requires that, adapting to a moving and changing environment very quickly at a level that is expert level. So, that is what’s really exciting here. And there’s a type of technology that this robot and many other more recent robots use that enables that. It’s a stream of machine learning called reinforcement learning.
Give me the two-sentence summary, if you could, of what reinforcement learning is.The idea is that, before recently, we had to program robots to do specific things. We had to give them specific instructions to do it. And so, a human is sort of doing that. But with reinforcement learning, which is essentially learning by trial and error, meaning that because you learned this skill by trying different scenarios, you have been able to adapt to more scenarios than a human could have programmed you to do.
The Sharpa North robot plays table tennis with a person at the Sharpa booth during the CES tech show, Jan. 7, 2026, in Las Vegas. John Locher/AP Photo
Would it be fair to say the advancements in robotics we’re seeing are really advancements in AI?Yeah. So, for every robot system, let’s say the physical robot system, it has a mechanical component. And it also has, like the intelligence, the ability for the robot to interact with its environment intelligently. That is certainly all AI at the moment. AI is supercharging that capability for robots to have spatial understanding, know what’s going on and be able to predict how physics works, which is very hard. And we learned to do that over the years and years. So, AI is definitely enabling that to happen. And there are many applications in which we can see that people are feeling a bit safer, more comfortable to put robots into spaces that require high levels of safety because there’s a bit more of a sense that robots can adapt to uncertainty a bit better now.
What are the big barriers to robots being very useful day to day still?That’s a great question. A lot of the things that we are seeing in the news are mostly like really cool stunts, very exciting stuff, very exciting capabilities. But where robots are actually being used and creating value are in very niche environments, very specialized tasks. For example, Amazon Robotics, or Amazon broadly, has one of the largest deployments of robots doing warehouse fulfillment. It’s very specialized, very well-defined, very controlled environments. And robotics are doing pretty well there. When will robots come into our homes and do our dishes and help make our beds?
XR robot units place flowers into vasts during a demonstration after X Square Robot introduced the XR robot, which can perform house cleaning service works, in Beijing, April 21, 2026.Andy Wong/AP Photo
This is my question. Yes, tell me when.When robots [will] do that, it’s going to take a long time. It’s going to take a long time, primarily because of robustness and safety. Wherever you see robots really making inroads, we have designed the environment to fit the capabilities of the robot. But I don’t think you would be very excited to design your house to fit the capabilities of your floor cleaning robot. In spaces where robots have to adapt to the human environment, it’s very challenging. And that is really where we’re trying to make advancements at the moment.
And I understand that the dexterity of hands is a big problem with humanoid robots. It is actually very hard to engineer a hand as good as a human hand. Is that right?Yeah, that is right. Some people call that the holy grail of robotics, you know, manipulation, dexterity of the human hand. Yes, that is a critical thing, as well. That is like, okay, how could you actually get robots to effectively manipulate objects in a way that is even remotely similar, or at a certain level of performance, as humans can. It’s a mix of can you build robot hands and fingers that have the kinds of dexterity as a human, plus can you build the software that allows robots to understand, process both visual and tactile sensing capabilities, so the robot can actually know and get a sense of what it’s doing with its hand. Those two things need to come together really well, and there are advancements in that space. It’s very easy to build a robot hand that picks up one thing. It’s hard to build a robot hand that picks up anything.
Robot hands showcased at an exhibition in Hong Kong, April 13, 2026. Chan Long Hei/AP Photo
I understand another part of your work is getting kids interested in science, engineering, robotics, especially kids from Africa. Why is that a particular passion of yours?A couple of reasons. The first is that I strongly believe in the power of technology in creating a better world. I believe that technology can serve as a tool to create value, real-life value. And so, my passion, originally being from Nigeria and continuing to have family there and deep ties and connections, I’m very passionate about seeing the future where the Global South is not just a consumer of technology, but helping shape it and helping define how it shapes its own society. And we only do that through educating people to know how to use these tools to create value in their communities.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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7 min
April 28 Increasing frustration over UK deal with spy tech company
Last week, the US data and spy tech company Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on the social media platform X.
Based on a book by the firm’s CEO, Alex Karp, the manifesto — variously described as the “ramblings of a super-villain” and “a parody of a RoboCop film” — has renewed concern about the aspirations and motivations of a company that is increasingly embedded in state infrastructure on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s the contract with Britain’s National Health Service that has proven the most controversial, as Lars Bevanger, from our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, reports from Manchester.
Click on the player to hear the full story.
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7 min
April 27 Security tech start-ups play increasingly significant role in Ukraine war
Increasingly, European military readiness is bound up with its ability to respond to rapidly developing technology, such as drones.
The Ukrainian experience is showing that in this field, smaller, more agile security tech start-ups are playing an increasingly significant role.
From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Reporter Ben Bathke went to Estonia’s capital Tallinn to meet up with Ragnar Sass, an Estonian tech entrepreneur who has pivoted towards defense.
Click on the player to hear the full story.
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0 min
April 14 AI may be messing with our memories
It was a casual conversation with a friend that got Tim Requarth a bit freaked out. The friend had made an AI video, a fake video of himself scaling Mount Rushmore. And then some time passed, and the friend felt a tug of memory, not of making the video, but of actually scaling the mountain.
As a neuroscientist, Requarth had questions about the effect of AI on our brains, which he explored for an article in Longreads.
“The brain has some very fundamental processes for sorting reality from fantasy,” Requarth told The World, “… and it surprised me that something as simple as an app could trip those up.”
Carolyn Beeler: To begin to understand this a bit more, I want to have you walk us through how our brains actually store and retrieve memories. You wrote, hopefully, I think, that it doesn’t work like your phone storing photos. It’s actually more like your brain partially reliving the event. Tell us how that works.Tim Requarth: Yeah, so memory is a little bit different than phone storage, where you have a photo and you can go look it up. And if you’re not looking at it, it remains the same. And when you pull it up, it’s the same every time. In memory, what’s interesting is it’s a replay, not a retrieval. And so, with each replay, it can be a little bit different. So, memory is inherently a little bit unreliable, which I think is something we would all recognize from our day-to-day experience.
Connect the dots for us here. How does that attribute to how our brain’s memory works … how does that make it vulnerable to being confused about whether something you made yourself do in an AI video actually happened or not?Right. It’s really interesting. And I’ll be honest, I was surprised to hear this. … Let’s say you make a lot of these videos of yourself doing things like, you know, I had my friend who climbed Mount Rushmore, people make videos of themselves dancing in K-pop. People would make more mundane videos of them having a conversation with somebody about just a topic that they were interested in. So, there could be any number of ways. And imagine that you’re doing this hundreds of times. The memory of actually creating that video starts to fade. And the video itself starts to get recalled, but it gets kind of confused with whether you did it or not. And the more realistic or plausible it was, the more likely you’re going to mislabel it as something, not that I did with an AI app, but something that I did personally.
Art teacher Joyce Hatzidakis uses the AI tool Google Gemini in her high school classroom, Jan. 22, 2026, Riverside, Calif.Damian Dovarganes/AP/File
And so because you only make the video once, but you might watch it over and over and over again, those are the sort of neural circuits that keep being reinforced and triggered that start to tell you this is actually a memory.Yeah, and because it’s video, it’s something vivid when it comes up in your mind’s eye. And it says, “It’s vivid, so it’s probably more likely to be real.”
But does this also happen with, for example, virtual reality, which is very realistic these days, or like first-person video or computer games? Is this the same phenomenon that has already happened with other technologies just kind of tweaked here with AI?Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I mean, somebody can look at a photograph over and over again, and eventually it can insinuate itself into your memory. So this is not in any way about AI only. The difference is that AI can be very realistic and it can be infinitely generated and watched, and it’s pervading our lives in a way that is different than previous generations of media.
A person takes video of a Wehead interactive AI interface at the Wehead booth at Pepcom ahead of the CES tech show, Jan. 8, 2024, in Las Vegas. The device allows for human-to-AI interaction.John Locher/AP/File
You write about this whole phenomenon with, I would say, concern. There’s some trepidation in your voice in that article. Why?I find it concerning when a technology can trip up what I call root processes or very fundamental processes in the brain. And so, for example, we’ve already seen with social media that it encourages people to make comparisons of themselves to other people, influencers that maybe are projecting an unrealistic ideal of beauty, intelligence or success and it makes people feel bad. Now, imagine what you can do when you’re seeing images of yourself not quite living up to this reality. So, I think there’s a big potential for this kind of technology to drive or turbocharge some of the dynamics that we’re seeing in social media and take them to the next level.
So, you’re saying you could create, kind of, an idealized version of yourself with AI, and then you would be comparing yourself to this perfect version of yourself and falling short.You could or a company could, potentially.
Do you think that is more worrisome than comparing ourselves to others?I think, potentially, yes because I think that it can become internalized in a sense of identity of who we are, where when we really look at a real picture or our real actions in the real world, and they’re not living up to something that has been implanted, essentially, it’ll be hard to be yourself. It’ll be hard to break out of that.
Even if it’s labeled as AI, and you know it is, it still worms its way in there.Yeah, and that’s a great point. A lot of these things happen a little bit unconsciously and you have to reject them later in your brain and that doesn’t always happen, especially for younger and potentially more vulnerable users.
There’s also something that feels more fundamental about this, because in many ways we are just a collection of our memories. So, what’s really interesting to me here is what you’re suggesting about how malleable our memories are and even our sense of self.You’re right. That’s who we are. We are the collection of our memories, and we narrativize those to generate a sense of identity. And if that sense is contaminated, it’s gonna contaminate our sense of who we are and maybe what we can be. Is that gonna be neutral, positive or negative? I’m not sure, but the technology is capable of that. And you know, it remains to be seen what will happen with the next generation of self deep fake technology.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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7 min
March 12 AI is rapidly changing math, and mathematicians are defining their role in the equation
The 2001 Australian thriller “The Bank” introduces us to a boy in elementary school who is precociously gifted in mathematics. As an adult, he takes his deep knowledge and uses complex computational models to manipulate the world of finance.
What would the benefit to society be? We could predict the next market crash. This type of mathematics allows us to predict almost anything.
We’re in the midst of another mathematics revolution right now, and it’s not on the movie screen
— it’s happening because of artificial intelligence.
Daniel Litt, assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, joins Host Marco Werman to discuss what AI may be capable of doing mathematically.
Marco Werman: So, Daniel, you predicted last year that there was only a 25% chance AI could best [top human mathematicians] in writing a mathematical paper by 2030, and you already had to revise that forecast, is that right?Daniel Litt: So, what I would say is that I was pretty skeptical just a year or two ago that AI tools would be able to autonomously do research at the level of the top mathematicians, today, within the next five or six years. What I think is likely true, based on the current rate of improvement, is that they’ll be able to conduct high-quality research autonomously. That said, I would expect that if that’s happening, humans working with AI tools would do even better research.
Right, and that is a key point, but a big leap in a year. How exactly is AI changing the field of mathematics?Yeah, so right now, I would say a good rule of thumb is that AI tools are able to do mathematical tasks that someone, maybe a world expert in a given area, would find easy. So, that’s really useful, as individual mathematicians aren’t experts in everything, and being able to do something someone else finds easy is very powerful.
This photo taken March 12, 2014, shows a student’s glasses sitting on a notebook containing math exercises in a remedial mathematics course at Baltimore City Community College in Baltimore.Patrick Semansky/AP/File
Right, so that’s one way AI is changing the field of mathematics. Take us to other changes. Well, maybe let me just step back a little bit. So, two years ago, the models could do very little. They would struggle with basic arithmetic. One thing that’s changed a lot in the last couple of years is they’ve gotten very good at coding, and they’ve gotten more reliable with proof, so rigorously checking that a mathematical statement is true. In my view, the two ways the models have become useful for mathematical research are, first of all, they can prove statements that would maybe previously be required by an expert to prove. And they can do very involved coding tasks that let you kind of explore a mathematical phenomenon in some detail, which would have been challenging and would have been much more time-consuming previously.
Right, so we know that AI has its blind spots. I remember recently seeing that some AI chatbots struggle to answer how many Rs are in a word like strawberry. ChatGPT apparently did learn that, though. How do we know then that AI has solved a previously unsolved problem when that time comes? One challenge with using these models is that they’re not truth-seeking, so they’ll often produce something they claim is a proof, which may or may not be correct. And it’s very difficult to check. So, in fact, a lot of using the models to do mathematics is … they generate some claim, and then one has to check it … and that’s challenging.
So, humans still have to check the AI. When do you think that’s going to change, or will it ever change?I think it’s quite likely that it will not change for some time, you know, auto-formalization work has the promise of making some AI mathematics more reliable. But yeah, we’ll see how long that takes. Certainly, I don’t expect that to be practical in all areas of mathematics within the next couple of years.
So, Daniel, how would you describe what’s at the heart of the debate about AI’s role in the future of mathematics? Right now, the capabilities of these tools are to do tasks that would have previously required an expert, but were more or less routine for experts. And then the question is when and if the tools will be able to do non-routine tasks. Based on the trajectory of capabilities, I expect that it will happen soon in the next couple of years, maybe. My personal expectation is that we should expect to see AI tools doing high-quality autonomous research in the next five years, but definitely, that’s not a unanimous view in the mathematics community.
Daniel, in the past, I imagine computers were used to help confirm mathematical equations. Are we seeing a role reversal?So, historically, the way computers have been used in research is, well, you generate a huge number of examples and analyze them. Then there are a few cases of proofs that break up into hundreds or thousands of cases, and many of those cases can be resolved by a computer. So, famously, the proof of the four-color theorem, which is that you can color a map with four colors so that any two adjacent countries have different colors, required some computer aid. You should think of the current use of AI tools as a natural continuation of that.
I remember when I was in junior high school and handheld calculators became affordable enough for kids to bring to school. And then there was a debate about whether that inhibited our development of problem-solving skills. Is AI the next stage in that debate, or is this fundamentally a different conversation?I think, personally, that it’s a natural continuation of that question. Anytime you develop a new tool, it both enhances our capabilities by using it and makes certain old capabilities and techniques less useful and relevant. I think that’s just the natural progression of technology: You gain capabilities, and then the tool itself substitutes for some of the capabilities you needed previously. I think that’s okay.
I want to return to the clip we heard from that movie, “The Bank.” I mean, how could all of these changes impact things in the world of finance, for example, where math is really important, or policy making, where decision outcomes are often assigned a probability? That’s a great question. One exciting thing about the tools is that they’ll broaden the availability of mathematical techniques, so I think people who previously would not have tried to make a mathematical model for something might now have the capability to do that. You don’t need as much expertise to use the tools to do mathematics as you needed to do it without AI tools previously. There’s some danger in that, I think, one can misuse a tool, of course. But yeah, my hope is that they’ll lead to a democratization of mathematics and more people thinking mathematically and asking interesting mathematical questions.
Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.
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7 min
March 02 Health aid pact between US and Zimbabwe collapses
After negotiations around a funding agreement worth more than $360 million collapsed, the United States has said it will wind down health aid to Zimbabwe. Previously, USAID was the US government institution that provided financial assistance to Zimbabwe. However, after that agency was shuttered last year, money provided to the African nation’s government through this bilateral agreement was expected to replace some of the aid that had previously flowed through USAID.
The Zimbabwean government rejected the deal partly because of requirements to share health data, and several other African nations are also reviewing their new aid agreements with the US.
To better understand this, The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler spoke with Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Security and International Studies, about this strategy.
Locals residents carry a boxes and sacks of food distributed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in Kachoda, Turkana area, northern Kenya, July 23, 2022.Desmond Tiro/Ap File Photo
Carolyn Beeler: What is it about these agreements that a growing number of African nations are objecting to?Stephen Morrison: Apparently, there are conditions included in these agreements that call for the sharing of data and the sharing of specimens, as well as, reportedly, other transactional agreements which may be with respect to access to critical minerals and the like, and it’s touching on issues of sovereignty.
I do want to drill into the Zimbabwe case just so we can look at this as an example. The Zimbabwean government took issue with specific conditions about data sharing in the agreement, according to statements from a government representative, and also sharing of specimens of pathogens. Can you tell me any more about that and what Zimbabwe’s concerns were there?Well, on data, it’s privacy. And the pattern has been to rely heavily upon international NGO implementers that have controlled the data and have controlled the standardization and collection of data. That era is ending and responsibility for standardizing and ensuring quality, collection and protection of data is shifting to the partner countries. One of the big open questions is, “Are we going to enter a period where there is less standardization and more uncertainty about quality and protection of data?”
Health officials carry the coffin of Zimbabwean minister Perence Shiri, who died of Covid-19, during his burial in Harare, July, 31, 2020. Zimbabwes capital, Harare, was deserted on Friday, as security agents vigorously enforced the country’s lockdown amidst planned protests. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP File Photo
So, for example, if all the data about how viruses are spreading right now does not go through the WHO but is held by specific countries like the US when they give money to a specific country, what are the implications of that?Right. Some of the data we’re talking about is surveillance systems. The sharing of pathogenic samples is with respect to [when] you have an outbreak, you need to investigate the genetic makeup and quickly move towards the kinds of tests, the diagnostics, the therapies and vaccines required to bring those under control. But the sovereign concerns of a country like Zimbabwe is, “what guarantee is there to have affordable access to those tools?” These are valid and legitimate concerns, and they stem from the terrible experience that African states had during COVID-19, which brought forward very dramatically that low-income countries — African and others, or middle-income countries in the case of South Africa or Zimbabwe — were at the back of the queue.
When it came to vaccines? With respect to vaccines and other critical inputs, and they paid a huge price for that.
What is at stake on the ground for people who previously did benefit from USAID dollars helping provide care for things like HIV treatment, etc? What’s at stake for people in Zimbabwe?Well, so the Zimbabwe government, in taking a strong stand of this kind, if it results in a permanent rupture, it has grave consequences for its own population. It would be a tragedy. Neither Zimbabwe nor the United States can afford to have this rupture happen and be permanent.
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Health and Child Care Douglas Mombeshora holds up containers of lenacapavir, a new HIV prevention drug, during its launch in Harare, Zimbabwe, Feb. 19, 2026. Aaron Ufumeli/AP Photo
This is being seen as a more transactional approach to providing health aid. Is there a precedent for the US using health aid money as leverage in other types of deals?This has not been the pattern. This is a new dimension of conditionalities that applies to other sectors, whether tied to critical minerals.
As in the case of Zambia, we’re learning.Yes. You know, this is a transactional doctrine. If you read the America First Global Health Strategy, this is an administration that has laid this out.
I want to ask about historical precedents, though, because I’ve been reading that the Biden administration did sign bilateral deals with some 50 countries, including some in Africa as part of this deal in biosecurity, so they got pathogens in return for this aid. So, is this substantially different than things the US has done in the past?Well, the agreements concluded under the Biden administration were part of its global health security strategy. And that was not a transactional strategy. It was one that was calling for sharing of data, but it was investing in capabilities in health security.
Florence Makumene holds HIV medication that she received through funding from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), along with her hospital records book, at her home in Harare, Zimbabwe, Feb. 7, 2025. Aaron Ufumeli, AP File Photo
So, this seems different on balance to you?When we say transactional here, I’m assuming, and again, it’s difficult to know exactly because we don’t have the exact terms of what’s in these agreements that are now being scrutinized.
So, there’s limitations to what we can know. We’ve talked about how the criticisms or the concerns that Zimbabwe, for example, have here are valid about sharing data and pathogen samples. But you also mentioned how some of the goals of this new strategy from the Trump administration aim to improve basically self-sufficiency and governments building up their own capacities. Could there be upsides to this approach?Certainly, I mean, the reform measures at the heart of this strategy are ones that have been applauded by African governments, who looked at this acute dependence on the United States and thought, “This is dangerous!” So, I think we should be hopeful that there can be progress and that this model can work.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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7 min
February 09 Not quite The Terminator, these robots still look human-like and perform tasks
No, not the scary Terminator-like ones beloved of science fiction writers … We’re talking about the cute, helpful ones designed to help out in school.
And, yes — this really is a thing.
A Norwegian company is already successful in 17 countries with a small robot that can represent absent pupils in the classroom. DW’s Lars Bevanger reports from Oslo.
Click on the player above to listen.

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6 min
January 22 Nokia is back
A Nokia mobile phone was once the must-have gadget. But, with the advent of Smartphones, the Finnish communications giant became a case study in how a market-leading brand can suddenly crash and burn if it fails to keep up with technological innovation.
Today, however, Nokia is back as a global leader in radio and mobile communication technology. From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Lars Bevanger reports that the Finnish company has pivoted toward defense.
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0 min
January 21 In Kenya, there’s a quiet push for an electric car revolution
As a kid growing up in Kenya, Brian Arasa was always fascinated by cars — how they were built, where they were built.
“All my life, I’ve been watching documentaries, watching videos on vehicles being manufactured out there,” Arasa said. “But one question that always came into my mind was, are we actually able to do this here in Kenya?”
For decades, the answer to that question has simply been no. More than 90% of cars in Kenya are cheap, old internal combustion vehicles shipped in from other parts of the world, mostly Japan.
Arasa never thought he’d live to see a Kenyan-made electric car hit the market. That is, until he got hired by TAD Motors a few months ago.
An electric vehicle plant under construction.Courtesy of TAD Motors
“It’s really, really amazing,” Arasa, now the company’s head of marketing, said. “It’s a dream that I didn’t think [would] come to us [so soon].”
TAD Motors is the brainchild and namesake of Tadesse Tessema, an Ethiopian-born engineer who has spent most of his career in the Netherlands and has a knack for first-ever business ventures. In 1997, he helped develop the Netherlands’ first hybrid bus. Then in 2005, he started the first car assembly plant in Ethiopia.
“A car is not rocket science,” Tessema said in an interview with The World. He spoke with palpable confidence as he described his latest effort to turn Kenya’s automobile culture on its head.
In the 1980s, the Kenyan government tried to launch its own locally made car brand called Nyayo, but it never went into production due to funding issues. Another homegrown company called Mobius Motors did successfully launch in the early aughts, but folded last year because it couldn’t compete with cheap imports.
Given the historical backdrop, Tessema said it’s been tough to convince authorities and investors that his company will somehow work. After all, TAD isn’t just trying to defy the odds on local manufacturing, it’s also trying to create a new market for EVs in a country where less than 1% of cars are electric.
“It’s very, very difficult, even if you have the best idea,” Tessema explained. “It’s very difficult to get financing for the project.”
As a result, TAD Motors is mostly funded by friends, family, old coworkers and Tessema himself. It’s a risk, for sure, but Tessema said he’s not concerned, because TAD has a silver bullet of sorts: Its electric cars — especially the compact cars — are remarkably cheap.
“We are coming with a price range of $10,000 dollars,” Tessema said. “There is no company, even in China, that can make these cars for this price.” With the way Kenya’s financing works, Tessema said that makes TAD’s cheapest model as affordable as a used import.
TAD Motors’ electric cars — especially its compact cars — are remarkably cheap, with a price range around $10,000 dollars.
Courtesy of TAD Motors
That model is a no frills vehicle with a small battery. Its driving range per charge is only about 150 miles, roughly half of what you’d get from a Tesla or BYD.
But, Tessema said, in East Africa, that’s all people really want and need. They see cars as a means of getting from point A to point B, he argued, and surveys conducted by TAD found that the average driver doesn’t need a big charging range.
“Normal people, they drive within a day, between 50 and 70 kilometers (31 to 43 miles),” Tessema said. “The main part of EV-making that makes it very expensive is the battery. So, [by] minimizing things which are not necessary for daily use, we have managed to reduce the price this much.”
Still, experts caution that a low-range could be problematic in a country like Kenya, where EV infrastructure doesn’t really exist.
“Charging stations are few and far between,” said Hamna Tariq, a research associate at the Energy for Growth Hub. Tariq co-authored a recent report on the challenges and opportunities for electric vehicle adoption across Africa.
TAD Motors cars on display at an expo in Kenya.Courtesy of TAD Motors
“Kenya has this goal of having 10,000 charging stations by 2030,” Tariq said. “I can’t tell you that they’re going to meet that goal. What I can tell you, from our analysis, is that Kenya only had 40 public charging stations a year and a half ago. And building 10,000 more in the next few years seems a little bit improbable.”
On top of that, Kenya has major struggles with grid reliability and frequently experiences prolonged blackouts. But, Tariq said, that doesn’t mean you should count out startups like TAD. If more EVs are sold, it could inspire officials to improve infrastructure.
“I would say it’s exciting that the startup scene in Kenya is so vibrant,” she said. “I am excited to see how TAD motors actually implements this and how they start selling it.”
TAD, for its part, says it won’t be too long before that dream is realized. The company is currently developing an assembly plant near the capital Nairobi and plans to begin producing fleets of ultra-cheap EVs in March. And TAD hopes to assemble 3,000 cars annually once full capacity production begins.
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0 min
January 07 Serbia tries to access its lithium reserves amid local opposition
Lithium is a vital resource for modern technology, and sourcing it close to home is a security priority for Europe.
Serbia’s Jadar Valley holds the continent’s largest lithium reserves, but accessing them in the face of local opposition is proving tricky.
Guy De Launey reports for our partners at DW, Deutsche Welle’s, program Inside Europe.
Click on the player to hear the full story.
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6 min