An all-electric vehicle future in the U.S. seems further away now than it did five years ago.
Under Republican leadership, the U.S. has cut subsidies to electric vehicles, forcing carmakers to rightsize their production and take billions in losses as the financial incentive that helped prop up demand was removed.
While 1 in 4 cars sold worldwide last year were EVs, penetration in the U.S. is still only about 10%, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2026 report. Last year was the fifth consecutive year global annual EV sales increased by 3.5 million, but the U.S. share of that chart is shrinking, while Europe’s and China’s are expanding.
But even progressive societies like China and Europe, where you might expect robust government support for EVs, are put to shame by what’s going on in Ethiopia.
The East African country is probably the last place one might expect an EV revolution to occur, but the landlocked country near the Red Sea banned the import of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in 2024. Two years later, the country is already seeing the benefits of that transformation.
Ethiopia leads the world in EV policy after gas vehicle ban
Banning the import of gas-powered vehicles, as Ethiopia did in 2024, is one thing, but providing electric vehicles with the government support they need is another.
Electric vehicles tend to be more expensive than their ICE counterparts, and the affordability gap is even wider when you consider that there are 30 and 40-year-old ICE vehicles for sale that are extremely cheap.
German news service DW recently did a follow-up on Ethiopia’s EV transformation two years after the ban, and the results are, to say the least, interesting.
The government introduced 100 new electric buses to the fleet in Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital, home to 4.2 million people. But Ethiopia didn’t stop there.
The country offers tax breaks for EV purchases, plans to build 17 EV assembly plants using imported parts from China, and has focused on climate-friendly public transportation, including fully electric light rail, to modernize the country for the 21st century.
“These electric buses are very different from the gasoline ones,” Shashe Asemare, a bus driver in Addis Ababa, told DW. “They don’t emit exhaust fumes or make that annoying noise.”
About 90,000 commuters use the bus system daily in the sprawling city, and at least one of those commuters likes the new buses better than the old ones.
“They’re very comfortable to travel in. They’re also better because they don’t pollute the air,” Zeraye Tekelu said, calling them “a step forward for our country.”
But the EV revolution is more than just the government providing green public transportation options for its citizens. Just two years after the ban, more than 100,000 of the country’s 1.2 million registered vehicles are electric. Ethiopia’s goal is to have 500,000 registered by 2030.
Ethiopia’s EV infrastructure is greener than that of the U.S., China, Europe
Some EV detractors point out that the electric grid in most first-world regions, such as North America, Europe, and China, is powered by coal and other polluting sources. So even when drivers switch to clean-burning EVs, the electricity needed to charge them is still not green.
This is not the case in Ethiopia.
Sitting at the headwaters of the mighty Nile River, Ethiopia is known as “Africa’s water tower,” so much of the country’s electricity is generated by hydropower. In fact, 96% of the country’s electricity is powered by water.
The newly opened Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is expected to double the country’s electricity supply, thanks to its capacity to produce more than 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy.
But one place where the government has been lacking is the EV charging infrastructure needed to support their EV revolution.
“The government should work hard on this sector,” Abdurahman Ali, a cab driver in Addis Ababa, told DW, as the service is only available in the capital, where “the number of charging stations is not sufficient.”
The majority of the country’s 500 charging stations are located in the city.
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