The removal of subsidies may make electric vehicles a more attractive option for Nigerian drivers, but the industry still has to confront several structural challenges to succeed. A four-year-old company is betting on a comprehensive approach.
On May 29, 2023, as part of a raft of reforms introduced by the then newly elected Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, subsidies on fuel products in Nigeria were removed.
This was a profound economic shock for motorists in the oil-rich nation who had become accustomed to paying less than market rates for petroleum products. In the event, however, it may well turn out that the death of petroleum subsidies may give life to an electric vehicle boom in Africa’s most populous country and its third-largest economy.
Electric vehicles are, for now, a minority pursuit in Nigeria. Of the 720,000 vehicles that are (mostly) imported into the country every year, only about 1% are electric, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy non-profit based in the US.
However, a local ecosystem of sorts is evolving. From assembly and charging stations to battery swapping, local companies, some with foreign partners, are slowly building capacity to support the growth of the market.
Among them is Qoray Mobility & Energies, which is attempting to address the question from a wider perspective. It is not enough, they contend, for the cars to be available. “Clean tech in Africa scales when it becomes affordable and financeable, not when it becomes more advanced,” says Olabanjo Alimi, the founder.
That is indeed the central question that companies trying to put electric vehicles on Nigeria’s roads must confront. For potential users in Nigeria and indeed other African countries, the calculus rests on whether they can pay for the cars and whether there is a support system of charging solutions and after-sales service that can support its usage.
That is the challenge that Qoray is building its business model around. “The vehicles are the visible part. The business is the software and the financing underneath,” Alimi says. That will be an important differentiator in the emerging market for electric mobility in a West African economic powerhouse.
Olabanjo Alimi, founder and CEO of Qoray Mobility & Energies
Local actors in the field
Qoray is not entering an empty field. Already, Spiro has made its mark as one of Africa’s largest electric-mobility companies, combining vehicle manufacturing, battery swapping and financing. Its Nigerian operations are part of a much broader continental strategy, with the company investing heavily in manufacturing and swapping infrastructure.
MAX offers another model. The Lagos-based mobility company has evolved from motorcycle ride-hailing and vehicle subscription into a wider platform incorporating electric vehicles, fleet management, battery swapping, charging and financing. It has attracted significant international capital to expand its fleet and infrastructure.
Then there are the companies addressing the opportunity purely from the manufacturing side. Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing is developing locally assembled electric models, while SAGLEV and JET Motor are building domestic EV assembly capacity. Other companies are concentrating on charging, battery swapping or renewable-energy infrastructure.
The competitive landscape is itself a demonstration of the immense potential that the market has. It also means Qoray cannot win simply by putting more electric vehicles on Nigerian roads.
The company began life in 2024, initially signing with Chinese manufacturers and launching what it describes as Nigeria’s first commercial EV charging station. In 2024, it expanded its charging infrastructure, started assembling electric tricycles and financed solar projects. By 2025, the company says it had assembled 2,000 electric tricycles locally and deployed more than 2,000 EVs overall.
The company also reports having mobilised more than ₦20bn ($15m) in clean-energy and sustainable-mobility assets and installed more than 7MWh of decentralised solar systems, remarkable results for a relatively young company.
Rather than merely selling vehicles, it is attempting to build a comprehensive system that holds the hands of consumers from buying through the life of the vehicle. “You cannot sell EVs without places to charge them,” Alimi points out.
Payment is also another crucial piece of the jigsaw in selling new technologies in Africa. There are some pioneers that Qoray can learn from, however. Solar companies such as Sun King and M-KOPA demonstrated that affordable payment models and customer data can be as important as the solar panels themselves. Qoray is attempting to apply a similar logic to mobility.
Financing system
An important part of Qoray’s proposition is its Superdash platform, which enables digital payments, financing and collections. The idea is to give financiers more data than they typically have when lending to car buyers.
A driver without a formal credit history may still generate a predictable daily income. If the vehicle is connected to a digital platform that records its earnings and repayment behaviour, the lender has more information with which to assess the risk.
“We build the technology that makes an unbankable sector bankable,” Alimi says of the Superdash platform. He argues that data can build the bridge between the financier and the borrower who may not meet conventional standards of scrutiny but nevertheless has the income that makes him a worthy risk.
“Data is what turns an asset nobody wants to finance into one a bank will fund. With real-time visibility and revenue assurance, we can finance a ₦4m electric 3-wheeler for someone with zero credit history. They repay over 2-3 years from daily earnings, while earning 3-4x the national minimum wage. That’s how we turn riders into owners and how we make them real stakeholders in the energy transition story,” Alimi explains.
If the model works at scale, its significance could extend beyond EVs, but that proposition still has to be proven. Success will not merely be about how many vehicles Qoray has deployed, but how many are generating revenue, whether repayments are made on time, what default rates look like and how much it costs to recover a vehicle when a customer fails to pay. Those are the metrics that will determine whether Qoray’s financing proposition is genuinely disruptive.
There is also the matter of electricity. Nigeria’s notoriously unreliable power supply means that charging electric vehicles is a more complex and expensive exercise than it should be. Qoray appears to have addressed this in its business model. It is combining solar energy generation, storage and charging into a comprehensive system that keeps cars on the road.
Battery swapping is also another option that it supports, particularly for motorcycles and three-wheelers. Instead of waiting for a battery to charge, a driver can exchange a depleted battery for a charged one and return to work within minutes. This is important, especially for commercial drivers who have to remain on the road to meet their sales targets and make their repayments.
While Qoray and others in the nascent sector can deploy these innovations, a lot will also depend on the policy environment in which they operate. Operators may thus welcome the government’s efforts, including the proposed Electric Vehicle Transition and Green Mobility framework, which includes incentives for EV users and investors, including tax and duty measures, support for charging infrastructure and provisions aimed at developing domestic vehicle and battery manufacturing.
The government has also expanded its Presidential Initiative on Compressed Natural Gas to include electric vehicles, signalling an openness to include electric mobility firmly in its overall transport strategy.
If there is one country to emulate, it is Ethiopia that has become today the fastest-growing market for electric vehicles on the continent, outpacing many European peers. In 2024, more than 60% of new cars sold in Ethiopia were fully electric.
It is said that 5% of cars are electric today in the country, well ahead of global averages. But it is on two wheels where the biggest change is taking place, and this is prevalent throughout the continent. Spirio, for example, aims to build an EV ecosystem across the continent, starting on two wheels.
For Qoray and the other players in the sector, this could be a fillip to their ambitions, which they have in abundance. Alimi says the company wants two out of every ten EVs in Nigeria to be Qoray-powered within five years, while also considerably scaling up their distributed solar installations.
Achieving that would require the company to move into an entirely different league. It would also need significantly more capital, increased manufacturing capacity, a nimble commercial operation and enhanced partnerships with financial institutions to support buyers.
Alimi, however, is determined and committed. “Africa must build its own solutions. “Nobody is coming to save us,” he says. It is a refreshing, if not completely original, take, but in the end, it is the results that will matter. As he himself recognises, in the EV industry, building the vehicles is often the easy part. The real task will be to make clean technology affordable and achievable in a largely informal economy. And they are only just getting started with that.
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Can make electric vehicles work in Nigeria?
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