The ongoing energy crisis in Ghana doesn’t seem to have dampened the hopes and aspirations of many of its enterprisers, as a group of students and lecturers in at the Kumasi Polytechnic Institute in Ghana’s second main city are resorting to electricity to advance their automotive industry.
Ghana imports an estimated 70,000 vehicles annually, which are powered by either petrol or diesel. These cars are also typically old, meaning that their exhaust fumes contribute to the problem of air pollution.
For this reason, Kumasi Polytechnic has taken to finding an alternative source of fuel for cars, and they have settled on electricity.
However, their technology does not necessarily lead to building a brand new car. According to AfricaNews, Samuel Ampiah, who is the Technical Head of the Kumasi Poly Electric Vehicle project, explains, “Like what we have developed, if you’re having an already existing vehicle, all that we do is we only change a section of the engine and then we fix the electrical component in for you to use it without buying fuel.”
Mamadu Hamidu, who led the research, said they had to check what the effect would be of a possible shift to electricity for cars that currently run on fossil fuels. She continues, “So we decided to contact certain vehicle transport yards that make maintenance so we also assessed their environment and talk to them about certain kind of materials they use that help them in fabrication processes. So based on these approaches, we were able to come up with a very good idea to suit our technology.”
Kumasi has since gone ahead to build its own electric powered vehicle, and after only five months, the vehicle was ninety percent complete.
However, some Chinese firms expressed misgivings for the program, Kumasi Polytechnic’s rector, Prof. Nicholas Nsowah-Nuamah, explains, “There was a professor in mechanical engineering who said that really if you are able to do this type of car you are talking about, then that would a revolution in electric car assembly because it has never been done anywhere.”
The solely Ghanian-made electric car is expected to be ready by August of this year.
