The past and future of clean transportation with Doreen Orishaba, Daniel Sperling, and Gil Tal

[00:00:04] At 16, I held my very first driver's license in my hands. I'd spent an entire year in defensive driver classes, logging hours with capable adults, working toward that moment. I walked out of that DMV with what felt like pure, undiluted freedom.

[00:00:25] But instead of a new pair of wheels, I traded my mom's car keys for a MetroCard when I left for college in New York City. Unlimited rides, no tank to fill, no parking to find. The city moved me wherever I needed to go, and I let it. So when I did finally get a car, well, I had a lot to learn about technology, energy, and what driving into the future really looks like.

[00:00:55] This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. I didn't get my first car until I was 33, and only because Georgia had made the choice for me. No subway, buses that ran on inconvenience, constant Uber rides bleeding into my budget. So I bought a car and drove what would cost me a small fortune to fill up every single week.

[00:01:23] By 36, I'd upgraded to what I'd been waiting for, my own electric SUV. The market had finally caught up to regular people. Sitting behind that wheel for the first time, I genuinely felt like I was living in the future. Until that future ran out of charge. I had 256 miles of range. It was plenty for my daily Atlanta loop until the battery started to lose lasting power.

[00:01:52] Then it wasn't. Public charging stations meant standing in line next to other EV owners doing the exact same math I was doing. Charging at home wasn't always an option, especially when the battery started running low real fast. My own lived experience is exactly why Doreen Orishaba's story caught my attention. In 2011, she helped build Africa's first electric vehicle.

[00:02:21] She did it at a time when critics dismissed it as a toy for the Western world. She ignored them. Today, she's operating over a hundred electric buses across Kenya and Rwanda, moving thousands of people to work every day on zero exhaust, near silent engines. She's designing electric vehicles that are made for the future and that can handle more and more with each iteration.

[00:02:49] And she's asking a question the U.S. market is only beginning to reckon with. What if the countries that skipped a century of fossil fuel infrastructure are the ones best positioned to build what comes next? Here's her talk. When you sit in your car or any car, do you ever wonder how many parts that car is made of? Do you also ever wonder, what does it really take to put all this together? Anyone?

[00:03:19] Now let me get to it. How many of you have ever built a car from scratch? Oh, great. Good to see you. Absolutely. And I'm also honored to say that I have an electric one at that. Growing up as a follower of four boys, earned me an early ticket to the fascinating world of speed and cars. There's something thrilling, something very powerful about, you know, the vehicles,

[00:03:50] the elegance of the design, the engineering, putting it all together. But what really excites me the most today is the future of mobility, electric mobility. I was first introduced to the electric vehicle world during my time as a student at Makerere University. Kira Motors of Uganda was the very first company on this continent to dream beyond fuel.

[00:04:20] In 2011, Kira Motors built Africa's very first electric car. And this is at a time when the rest of Africa was not paying any attention whatsoever to the electric vehicle space or even the urgency of addressing the climate crisis. I was privileged to join this team, and we moved on to produce Africa's very first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. And we also proceeded to build Africa's first solar electric bus prototype.

[00:04:54] As you can imagine, at that time, we're talking about more than 10 years ago, some people used to think maybe this electric vehicle stuff, these are toys for the Western world. But for us, we were driven by the vision that Africa should contribute to the future of electric mobility and not just be a consumer. Electric buses are now a very prime opportunity. Buses are the lifeline in African cities,

[00:05:22] moving over 60 percent of the population every single day. And public transport in most of the regions in Africa, it's led by the private sector. So we have electric mobility startups that are driving really the vision of electric buses. This is happening here in Kenya, in Rwanda, in Nigeria. But at the end of the day, despite all these efforts,

[00:05:51] scaling electric mobility is facing huge challenges. Talk of range anxiety, the high upfront cost of electric vehicles and limited charging infrastructure is really slowing down the adoption of electric mobility. But these challenges are not new. They are the same hindrances that stopped the electric vehicle from growing in the 1890s. However, the times are different. We cannot afford to wait.

[00:06:21] The planet is telling us that we need to act really soon. And we are proving that there is a way to overcome these challenges. I am Doreen Orishaba, the Managing Director of Busy Go Rwanda. At Busy Go, we provide electric buses as a cost-effective alternative to the diesel bus. We started out here in Nairobi in 2022, and we've scaled now into Rwanda,

[00:06:48] with now a total fleet of 77 buses between both countries. And every single day, we are enabling the commute of over 30,000 passengers between both countries. Thank you. We've built this by overcoming some of these challenges. Number one, we are cheaper than diesel. Electricity in both Kenya and Rwanda is locally generated from renewable,

[00:07:17] like hydro and wind. That not only makes electricity much cheaper, but also cleaner, because remember, the diesel is all imported here. So electricity is cheaper, it's cleaner, and it's more stable. We design for the local needs. Have you ever wondered, what kind of specification do we need for the bus to be deployed in any of these markets? We do not make assumptions.

[00:07:45] We pilot with a small fleet, and then scale based on the local needs. We get in and optimize the battery capacities, the suspension systems, the drive systems, and make sure that at the end of the day, we are using the real-life route data in order to scale. I recall when we were doing the market survey in Rwanda, one of the top questions that we always received was,

[00:08:12] are you sure your electric bus will be able to handle Kigali's hills? It's been 18 months now of our operation, and that question is now history. We equip our buses with high-torque motors for the steep inclines and regenerative braking for the descent to be able to harvest the energy back into the battery, and then this boosts the efficiency of our buses as well as minimizing the brake wear.

[00:08:42] One thing that really excites me about our Nairobi fleet is we are locally assembling these electric buses right here. These buses have been built with lots of love and passion. And, you know, local assembly not only helps reduce the cost, but we are enabling to build the critical local manufacturing capacity on the planet while also creating jobs. At the end of the day,

[00:09:11] it's going to be about what can we all do together. How do we handle the range anxiety? We are building up charging infrastructure. Let me ask you, what's your dream car? Did you ever think about, oh, now that I'm buying the car, I also need to build a gas station for it? Right? No one ever thinks about that. It should be no different for the electric vehicles. As Busy go, we go out and build the charging infrastructure.

[00:09:40] We have a dedicated charging infrastructure team that identifies and builds out the charging stations. We handle all the permitting, all the compliance requirements so that our partners do not have to do that. And we've built stations in strategically located places right near the bus routes. At our stations, we're able to recharge our buses in about one and a half to two hours, removing this entire burden from the operators. Think about service and maintenance.

[00:10:09] We take this burden away from the operator as well. You know, new technology can be intimidating, right? Especially when there's no local available capacity to be able to support that. So as Busy go, we have set up service centers in both Kenya and Rwanda, fully equipped with trained staff, specialized tools, as well as parts inventory to minimize the downtime of these buses. However, our biggest innovation

[00:10:39] is in the financing of these buses. We provide the buses through a lease model that we call Pay As You Drive, taking away the need for the operators to invest heavily at the start. I've seen firsthand the transformation that electric mobility is bringing to Kenya and to Rwanda, the smiles and the awe of the passengers as they experience the Busy go bus,

[00:11:08] a ride so quiet and yet so revolutionary. The relief of the operators being able to scale without being choked by the heavy bank loans. But I'll be honest and say, is it a smooth ride? Perhaps not. We're experiencing different challenges. Right from product iteration to the flooding that we recently faced here in Nairobi, which is a direct threat to our operation because of where our batteries are placed.

[00:11:37] But then it's a reminder of why we are doing this climate change. And I'll be honest and say, at the end of the day, we wouldn't trade these experiences for anything else. It is what's bringing us together as a team. Given where we are, Africa really has the potential to be able to lead in this electric mobility movement across the globe.

[00:12:08] Think about here in East Africa. Our electricity is over 90% renewable. That means deploying an electric vehicle here has much greater impact than anywhere else in the world. One of our electric buses replacing a diesel bus enables the mitigation of up to 50 tons of CO2 every single year. That is five times more than what the Tesla

[00:12:36] is able to mitigate in California. And what is that speaking to? Africa has already proven that we are able to lead in the electric vehicle mobility. We do not have to follow the path of fossil fuel that we followed before. We don't have to catch up on the electric vehicle mobility movement. We can actually lead this. So far, we have proven that zero carbon transport

[00:13:05] is possible, it's viable here in Africa with the greatest environmental impact, with greater social impact, and with no government subsidy. Africa definitely has the potential to be able to lead in some of these other sectors that were previously stated to be out of the reach for us.

[00:13:34] I hope you'll be on board as we make this a reality. Asante. That was Doreen Orishaba, at TED Countdown 2025. Now here's what the data tells us. Electric vehicles are not a niche experiment anymore. Global EV sales in 2026 are on track to hit roughly 22.7 million. That's nearly a quarter of the entire global car market,

[00:14:03] representing 5% year-over-year growth, even as incentives slow down. Global EV sales in 2026 are on track to hit around 22 million cars. That's nearly a quarter of the entire global car market, representing 5% year-over-year growth, even as incentives slow down. But here's the part that catches people off guard. The center of gravity has shifted.

[00:14:33] The U.S. is stalling. The rest of the world is accelerating. Vietnam nearly doubled its EV sales share since 2024, approaching 40% market penetration ahead of the U.K. and the EU. Ethiopia banned combustion engine vehicle imports outright in 2024 and posted a 60% EV sales share the same year.

[00:15:01] Nepal crossed 76% of new car sales being electric. Let that sink in. Those aren't wealthy, heavily subsidized Western markets with decades of charging infrastructure behind them. They are nations making a deliberate strategic bet on an electric future and winning it. And it's not just personal vehicles. The electric bus market is the backbone of public transportation in growing cities.

[00:15:30] It was valued at $54 billion in 2025 with projections reaching $255 billion by 2035. Latin America alone runs on a fleet of over 6,000 electric buses growing at 33% annually reshaping how people in cities like Bogota, Santiago, and Sao Paulo get to work every morning. And now,

[00:16:00] the part of this story I find equal parts humbling and maddening. We've been here before. Battery-operated buses were running in Paris in 1881. Electric vehicles existed at the very birth of the automobile industry and they were winning. Quieter, more comfortable, far easier to operate than the combustion engine. But once oil markets stabilized and gas became cheap and convenient again,

[00:16:29] we reached back for the fossil fuel option and we squandered more than a century of momentum. The TEDx lesson you're about to hear makes that history undeniable. If you were buying a car in 1899, you would have had three major options to choose from. You could buy a steam-powered car, typically relying on gas-powered boilers. These could drive

[00:16:58] as far as you wanted, provided you also wanted to lug around extra water to refuel and didn't mind waiting 30 minutes for your engine to heat up. Alternatively, you could buy a car powered by gasoline. However, the internal combustion engines in these models required dangerous hand-cranking to start and emitted loud noises and foul-smelling exhaust while driving. So your best bet was probably option number three, a battery-powered electric vehicle.

[00:17:28] These cars were quick to start, clean and quiet to run, and if you lived somewhere with access to electricity, easy to refuel overnight. If this seems like an easy choice, you're not alone. By the end of the 19th century, nearly 40% of American cars were electric. In cities with early electric systems, battery-powered cars were a popular and reliable alternative to their occasionally explosive competitors.

[00:17:57] But electric vehicles had one major problem. Batteries. Early car batteries were expensive and inefficient. Many inventors, including Thomas Edison, tried to build batteries that stored more electricity. Others even built exchange stations in urban areas to swap out dead batteries for charged ones. But these measures weren't enough to allow electric vehicles to make long trips, and at over twice the price of a gas-powered car, many couldn't afford

[00:18:27] these luxury items. At the same time, oil discoveries lowered the price of gasoline, and new advances made internal combustion engines more appealing. Electric starters removed the need for hand cranking, mufflers made engines quieter, and rubber engine mounts reduced vibration. In 1908, Ford released the Model T, a cheap, high-quality, gas-powered car that captured the public imagination.

[00:18:56] By 1915, the percentage of electric cars on the road had plummeted. For the next 55 years, internal combustion engines ruled the roads. Aside from some special-purpose vehicles, electric cars were nowhere to be found. However, in the 1970s, the tide began to turn. U.S. concerns about oil availability renewed interest in alternative energy sources, and studies in the 1980s

[00:19:26] linking car emissions with smog in cities like Los Angeles encouraged governments and environmental organizations to reconsider electric vehicles. At this point, car companies had spent decades investing in internal combustion engines without devoting any resources to solving the century-old battery problem. But other companies were developing increasingly efficient batteries to power a new wave of portable electronics. By the 1990s, energy-dense

[00:19:56] nickel-metal-hydride batteries were on the market, soon followed by lithium-ion batteries. Alongside regulatory mandates by California to reduce smog, these innovations sparked a small wave of new electric vehicles, including hybrid cars. Hybrids aren't true electric vehicles. Their nickel-metal-hydride batteries are only used to optimize the efficiency of gas-burning engines. But in 2008, Tesla Motors

[00:20:25] went further, grabbing the attention of consumers, automakers, and regulators with its lithium-ion-powered roadster. This purely electric vehicle could travel more than 320 kilometers on a single charge, almost doubling the previous record. Since then, electric vehicles have vastly improved in cost, performance, efficiency, and availability. They can accelerate much faster than gas-powered sports cars, cars,

[00:20:55] and while some models still have a high upfront cost, they reliably save their drivers' money in the long run. As governments around the world focus on slowing climate change, electric vehicles are now expected to replace gas-powered ones altogether. In Norway, 75% of car sales in 2020 were plug-in electric vehicles. And policies such as California's zero-emission vehicle mandate and Europe's aggressive CO2

[00:21:25] emission standards have dramatically slowed investments in gas-powered vehicles worldwide. Soon, electric cars will reclaim their place on the road, putting gasoline in our rear view. There's something both clarifying and sobering about knowing that electric vehicles didn't emerge from some Silicon Valley breakthrough. They were always here. The technology existed. The choice to abandon it

[00:21:55] was exactly that. A choice. Doreen's work in East Africa and the data pouring in from Vietnam, Nepal, and Ethiopia all point to the same truth. The future of clean transport isn't waiting to be invented. It's waiting to be chosen again by enough people in enough places with enough conviction to hold the line this time. The question I find myself sitting with is who gets

[00:22:24] to make that choice and who gets left out of the infrastructure when the next transition happens because the future has a way of arriving unevenly. I've felt that personally, white-knuckling a highway with 10 miles left on the gauge in a country that built the promise but skipped the access. What Doreen or Ishaba understands with the leapfrogging nations seem to understand is that if you're

[00:22:54] not inheriting a broken system you're free to build a better one. That's not a small insight. That's the whole story. And that's our show. I'm Sherelle Dorsey and this was TED Tech. Thanks for thinking alongside us today. TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar

[00:23:24] and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Constanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Belarreso, Maria Ladias, Tanzika Sangmanivan and Roxanne Highlash. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.