This African EV Startup Is Crazy About Solar, and Wants To Prove a Point

We all have different ideas of the future of mobility. While a lot of us purists wish with all our might that things would stay the way they are—that is, gasoline-powered internal combustion—it’s clear that society is transitioning to more sustainable alternatives.

And so the future of mobility, at least at present, is for the most part, looking very electric. But the way we get that electric power can vary. For example, in the dry and sunny deserts of Africa, the cosmic rays of the sun are being used to produce energy for mobility.

EV motorcycle startup Roam Electric in partnership with the Stellenbosch University is demonstrating this in a daring adventure, one that will see two Roam Air electric motorcycles embark on a 6,000-kilometer (3,728 miles) journey.

The Roam Air is the company’s vision of an electric workhorse of the future. It’s a compact yet robust electric motorcycle that’s as simple as it gets. Easy to repair, easy to ride, and capable of conquering the harsh landscapes of the African continent. It can easily be decked out with luggage for last-mile delivery use, and it can also be used as a people-mover and personal commuter.

So yeah, it’s quite the versatile machine. And so it just makes sense that this bike would be the subject of an immense torture test that will take it from the busy streets of Nairobi to the shores of South Africa.

But there’s a kicker.

Instead of planning the route to include pit stops at charging stations or battery-swapping stations, Roam’s mission will see the bikes rely solely on solar power to juice up their batteries. No, they won’t be strapping massive solar panels onto their bikes as they ride, but rather, they’ll be followed by a convoy of two solar-powered vehicles that ensure that a backup supply of batteries are always juiced up.

Roam ascertains that they won’t be using any fossil fuels for the entirety of the trip, just good old-fashioned sun juice.

So now you might be wondering: what’s the whole point of this long-distance trip if the Roam Air will be accompanied by support vehicles? Well, it isn’t really to showcase the capability of the Roam Air, or that of electric motorcycles as a whole—we know that EVs are capable of covering great distances provided they keep their batteries juiced up.

Instead, Roam’s goal here is to prove that the sun is one heck of an energy source, and one that could be a game-changer, not just for Africa, but for the rest of the world. Should Roam’s 3,700-mile odyssey prove successful, it could just catch the right attention for solar-powered charging and battery-swapping stations to be put up across the region, effectively making e-mobility a viable long-distance mobility option for more people.