Mana Mobility to produce electric vehicles in Ghana --Production to start next year

Mana Mobility has revealed plans of producing electric vehicles in Ghana, with production set to start next year.

Speaking in an interview with the Graphic Business at a media launch in Accra, the Chief Executive Officer   of the company, Mr Peter Schwarzenbauer, said the cars would be developed and produced in Ghana by Ghanaian people.

“We will do it here. We have been trying to develop the right concept for the market. We have experts coming in from different areas, we have the Design and Technology Institute from Accra also helping us to find the right way of doing it and the outcome has been great,” he stated.

He said the next step was to build some prototypes within the next six months.

“As soon as we have the prototypes then we will move into the next phase of registration and the legal framework for production to start.

“By summer 2023, we will be ready to start with the production,” he stated.

Environmental friendly cars

He said the car will be environment friendly, noting that aside the zero emissions that comes with electric cars, it would also take into consideration some other environmental issues.

“Emission free alone is not the solution if you build it with lot of materials that damage our environment.

“That is why we put a lot of effort in the interior development of the car

All the materials will be already recycled or should be recyclable.

“We also looking at having a natural floor which is made of bamboo,” he stated.

He said the company would put in all measures to make the car environmentally friendly.

Micro factory

Commenting on how many cars the company intends to produce, he said the target was to produce 20,000 cars in Ghana.

“We are going to build the cars in a micro factory so we are not going to use robots and lots of machines

“It’s basically going to be made by hand and we could build up to 20,000 vehicles. But we will build them gradually and ramp it up as time goes on. We will do about 500 the first year, maybe a 1000 the second year and ramp it up going forward. The ultimate is to have one factory at full capacity producing about 20,000 cars,” he noted.

He said this would create lots of jobs for the youth of the country.

Capacity to regulate electric cars

Also speaking in an interview with the Graphic Business, the Director General of Ghana Standards Authority, Professor Alex Dodoo, said the GSA had the capacity to regulate electric vehicles in the country.

He said since the government decided to have the automotive development policy, the GSA had developed standards for producing vehicles in the country.

“The key issues we had was emission standards because in Europe they are very high and we had to try and have emission standards that will allow all other operators to come in. Electric vehicles will not have that problem but we have standards for braking systems, reflectors, lights, and have standards for all the safety components of vehicles.

“Through the development of the auto policy, we trained about 12 engineers in south Africa and Ghana for the standards authority to do certification checks on the vehicles that will be produced here,” he stated.