Roam: Electrifying Africa’s mobility

“We’re giving the opportunity for people to do a lot of technical work, that generally doesnt happen too often in Kenya”

If you’ve been to East Africa you may be familiar with “boda bodas.” If not, they’re small taxi bikes, commonly used by couriers or to transport people. There are 1.2 million of them in Kenya alone, that’s a lot of combustion engines on the roads, and removing them is the problem that Roam Electric are helping to solve

Roam was founded in 2017. They started out making electric safari vehicles (no surprise being located right on the edge of the national park) but they now aim to create an electric future for Africa by producing easy-to-use, affordable electric vehicles. As well as developing innovative electric buses as the country’s newest and greenest mass transit solution, they also build an electric motorcycle called the Roam Air, primarily targeted at boda boda riders.

In this episode we head to Nairobi to visit Roam’s HQ to meet Masa Kituyi and Dennis Wakaba who show us round the shop floor, take a spin on a Roam Air and hear how the technology and design behind these motorcycles is the future of mobility in Africa.

The other fascinating aspect of this story is the positive impact that the company is having locally. The workforce is 39% female and they’re a success story in talent development in Kenya.

We also hear from Jon Hirschtick at PTC, who tells us about how the Onshape software helps the whole team at Roam collaborate seamlessly in the design process and management of the whole manufacturing journey.

Find out more about Roam here 

Find out more about OnShape here

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Helen Lennard. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where you’ll find us at the forefront of the electric mobility revolution in Kenya. 

I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

A staggering 10 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide in 2022. And while we all know that the future of transport is electric, the shift to electric vehicles can bring different challenges in different parts of the world. Roam Electric was founded in 2017 and aims to provide easy-to-use, affordable electric transport solutions to Africa. Although the company started in Sweden, it is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, and addresses the unique needs of the Kenyan market. 

If you’ve been to East Africa, you may be familiar with boda bodas. If not, they’re small taxi bikes commonly used by couriers or to transport people. Roam has built a custom-made electric bike called the Roam Air, which is a sustainable electric alternative to these traditional boda boda bikes. The company has also built electric charging stations, and has made Kenya’s first locally manufactured electric bus, the Roam Move. The motorcycles are built by a local workforce, which is 39% female, at East Africa’s largest electric motorcycle plant called Roam Park. They were also finalists in last year’s Earthshot prize. We sent our producer Michael to their headquarters in Nairobi to find out more about how they are designing bikes especially for the African market, as well as making the most of Kenyan talent by employing local engineers.

My name is Masa. I’m a product owner here at Roam for the electric bikes, the Roam Air, and I work a lot on building an electric bike that can fix a boda boda user case. Boda boda is a general term that we use here in Kenya to explain motorcycle riders of a specific type of motorcycle. They’re generally used as motorcycle taxis or last-mile delivery for many sorts of things in Nairobi. This could be from food deliveries to courier services, to taxis for general people to move from bus stop to their final destination, and so on. Roam Electric is a sustainability company that has been operating for the last six years. It’s a Swedish-born company that operates out of Nairobi, Kenya. We started by converting safari vehicles. Being a proof of concept of how we could electrify Africa one vehicle at a time started with safari vehicles, where we pulled out the diesel engines and made them electric. Over time, we then diversified our product market and moved into electric motorcycles, where today we sell the Roam Air. We also have energy and charging systems and electric buses. 

We have an electric motorbike called the Roam Air. This is my baby. I’ve been designing it for the last four years. We developed this motorbike right from the ground up. We designed it on our own frame for it, and a lot of the parts around it. We’ve gone on this journey for quite a while but launched the product in September last year, trying to grow the electric perspective and make electric bikes the new thing in Nairobi and in Kenya but without changing the user case. I don’t know how familiar you are with boda bodas, but in Nairobi, and in a lot of Kenya, people use motorbikes to take something that came off a truck to the last place. They generally carry very heavy loads, or very many people, and a lot of society relies on the motorcycle as the last part of a journey in any form. We tried to make it robust, simple to use, and it works. We’re not aiming to be lights and glitter, we want durable motorbikes that are reliable, it can get you from point A to point B, no matter what the circumstances are, no matter what you’re carrying. And we didn’t want to change those details. 

We have a carrying capacity up to 220 kilos, you are able to drive in thick-off-road mud, this African black mud that’s so notorious. We are able to ride in that and not have damage to our electrical system. You are able to ride through torrential rains when the roads flood and all of this. So we were building this to be the workhorse. Because our users are so reliant on the vehicle as a source of business, we needed it to be reliable, robust, simple to use, and fit into a culture that is already established and already knows what they’re doing, in Kenya. 

I think the best way is to just give you a demonstration and for you to see it and experience it yourself in person. It’s the best way. As I get onto the bike, I’m putting on my helmet. As you turn the ignition on, the screen comes on, has a bright display showing me my battery percentage. Right now, I’m at 28% which is about 30 kilometres of range. I have my different driving modes, my speed and my power reading. I can then press P and remove it from the parking gear into the drive gear. So right now the bike is active, it is live, it can move, so remove it from the centre stand.

This is our charging station. This is the charging cycle that most people will do at the end of the day when they get home. When they reach home, they can either remove the battery or charge the battery while it’s on the bike. In charging the battery, make sure that the bike is off, open the battery compartment, unplug the battery and slide it out. Plug in your charger and make sure that your charger is connected to the wall. And that’s it. It starts charging. 

In terms of comparison to petrol bikes, and other bikes you see on the market, electric is a lot cheaper. We have very low charging costs. To get you 75 kilometres of range, we’re talking about 80 shillings for you to charge. You can rent a battery from us from our charging station where it’s a 10 shillings deposit and then 10 shillings per hour. That allows you to be flexible, and as you’re leaving one battery behind to charge you rent another battery and you carry on with your business. Obviously, being electric, it doesn’t have as many moving parts as internal combustion bikes. So you don’t have oils to change, you don’t have filters, you don’t have a lot of the mechanical maintenance that you usually have. It’s just the same way that when you buy a phone and you don’t take it for service, it’s the same way with an electric motorcycle – you don’t have to do anything to the motor or the battery, or the controller. You charge it, and if it has power, it works perfectly. As our company says, “Electrifying Africa one vehicle at a time” is a big part of it. But it only makes sense if it’s affordable to the people. Our whole ethos around the electric motorcycle is not only driving down the price of the bike to be as cheap and as affordable as possible, but also to return revenue and increase profit for the users as we develop it. 

It is definitely a shift in the market of electric vehicles getting more popular, both in general for all vehicles, but mainly in electric motorbikes. We see a lot of parties coming into Africa trying to build and convert as much as this, and we are all for it. Because it is a mission to electrify Africa and make as many vehicles as possible. So all competitors are embraced, it’s a big world challenge that we’re trying to commit to and trying to develop towards. And it’s a win across the board. So we have seen a big upkeep of this, and many people are driving towards going electric, so we’re happy to see that happening. And we hope for the most success through it. 

A lot of our engineers are locally based. We’re strong believers that the Kenyan market has fantastic, brilliant engineers. And they’re all very passionate about this, being an engineer myself, found out about Roam and from the second that I read about it I wanted to work here. So there’s a lot of people who have built on that, and have a lot of passion in what they’re doing. We specialise in specific areas of development that might not be too common. This is, anywhere in the world, a challenge to find them to recruit for. So being in Kenya isn’t specifically a disadvantage. It’s being in a new field that requires us to step out and recruit for specific talent and certain skill sets. But it’s a great balance of people. I don’t know how much you’ve taken note of as we were walking around, but we have about 39% of our staff being female. And you’ll see that even on our production line to our engineers, to our after-sales. Just giving the ability for people to do a lot of technical stuff that generally doesn’t happen too often in Kenya. And just the ability to dive into deep engineering and deep research and development is something unique to this company. And it’s one of the reasons why I love it.

My name is Dennis Wakaba. I specialise in electric buses. So we do design and development of electric buses. And we have two types – the Roam Rapid and Roam Move. The Roam Rapid was designed and developed for the mass transit system, or BRT – bus rapid transport. Deployable across Africa. As you see here, Africa’s future is electric. And our mission is basically to electrify one vehicle at a time. So again, because Africa has all the resources it needs to produce electric vehicles from nickel, cobalt, lithium and everything, and a very young population – the median age is about 28 years or so – it means that it’s a new area that we as Africans must venture and go into, because the next vehicles starting from today will be electric. And that means we need to be prepared and capitalise on it. So Africa’s future is electric, and we have to capture the moment. 

That was Masa and Dennis from Roam Electric. Now, collaboration is incredibly important to the Roam engineering team in Kenya so that they can make sure their electric vehicles meet the needs of the market. One of the tools that helps them to do this is PTC’s cloud-based computer-aided design platform OnShape. It’s time to meet our expert, Jon Hirschtick, who can tell us more. 

Roam are growing fast and becoming more of an OEM-style company. They needed their CAD data to be in one place and managed through quite a robust PDM system – product data management. And this in turn led them to OnShape. So, Jon, can you give our listeners an idea as to why OnShape is the go-to cloud-native tool for designing collaboration?

Well, first of all, OnShape is a true multi-user environment. We allow designers, internal teams, customers and external partners to access CAD and PDM data to collaborate in real time at every stage from conception to production. OnShape’s built-in PDM system has a powerful set of tools for managing and controlling design data. Whether it’s 3D CAD, or even other documents and files that are part of a design project, we eliminate file copies and transfers entirely and we remove the most frustrating bottlenecks that you associate with old-fashioned, traditional CAD and PDM that are based on files and copies and locking and checkout. All that goes away. All the problems go away, and just the benefits, and even more benefit than other PDM systems have ever offered. Teams can edit the same design concurrently, real-time updating, there’s no need to check in, check out lock files. You store and track metadata associated with parts and assemblies, drawings, which enables users to find and reuse existing designs more efficiently. You save a lot of time, you save a lot of money. We also get a lot of fans for OnShape from the customer support system that we have that makes working and navigating issues in OnShape very easily. Whether you’re seeking support inside your team, from maybe an expert on your team, or calling on OnShape’s technical support, the same tools that we give to teams to collaborate with each other in working, we can use to do great support across teams and from our team to yours. 

Another key factor is automatic updates to OnShape every three weeks. Roam’s really impressed by the fact that OnShape updates come out automatically with no work on their part every three weeks. Everyone on the team is on the same version all the time. Everyone in the world is on the same version all the time. No more headaches about which version someone’s on, which is a huge problem with old-fashioned traditional CAD and PDM. Those updates have really benefited Roam in their CAD and PDM workflows.