Battery Shortages & Wait Times At Swap Stations In Kenya’s Booming Electric Motorcycle Sectors Show That It’s Time For Big Investors To Support These Companies

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Kenya’s electric motorcycle industry is one of the most exciting in the world, thanks to its rapid rise. I have been privileged to have seen it develop right from inception when startups literally had one internal combustion engine motorcycle and experimented with it, converting it to electric. That was over 6 years ago. Fast forward to today, electric motorcycles reached a 15.3% market share of new registrations in Kenya as of December 2025.

Registrations of electric motorcycles surged again in 2025 following a breakthrough year in 2024. In 2023, there were 70,691 motorcycles sold in Kenya in the overall market, and 2,557 of these were electric. That means 3.6% of motorcycles sold in 2023 in Kenya were electric. That is almost 4%. So, we did not expect it to be long before the market share reached the critical 5%, which is generally viewed as the tipping point indicating the start of mass adoption. The share of electric motorcycles had risen to 3.6% in 2023 from 2.8% in 2022 and 0.5% in 2021. 2024 was even better as the market share surged to 7.1%. The KNBS Economic Survey Report (2025) reported that 68,804 new motorcycles were registered in Kenya in 2024. Of these, 4,862 motorcycles were electric, according to data presented by the Electric Mobility Association of Kenya (EMAK). That is where the 7.1% market share comes from.

If 2024 was the breakout year, then 2025 showed that electric motorcycles have truly arrived in Kenya, as the market share of electric motorcycles reached a whopping 15.3%. This is really awesome, especially given the fact that just about 8 years ago only 44 electric motorcycles were registered in the whole country! The overall motorcycle market was up 145% from 68,804 motorcycles in 2024 to 168,286 in 2025.  With 25,277 of motorcycles registered in Kenya in 2025 being electric, it means 15.3% of all new motorcycle restorations in Kenya in 2025 were electric.How cool is that! With over 2 million internal combustion engine motorcycles registered in Kenya, the opportunity to electrify the sector is massive.

This rapid ramp-up can lead to unique challenges in the ecosystem. One of them that has emerged is a rapid rise in demand for batteries at swap centers as the number of motorcycles on the market grows. This is to be expected in such a scaled-up environment. Tom Courtright summarizes this issue quite well. Tom says simply put, this could be due to a mismatch between supply of batteries and demand from drivers at a given time. Drivers only notice this in a supply shortfall; if there’s excess batteries on the network, it’s more capital needed by the battery network, but that’s a boon for drivers.

So how does a battery shortfall happen? In general, there could be several possibilities:

1. Some batteries may run down faster than expected, taking batteries off network or reducing their capacity. This can happen especially in early stage pilots as companies put products in real life use cases and iterate from there. This will generally be ironed progressively out as companies identify issues and solve them as they iterate and scale. 
2. Too many motorcycles deployed ahead of battery deployment, knocking the companies’ ratio off
3. Battery import delays — most commonly during shipping or receiving customs. This is a common issue in Kenya.

Tom adds that in general, these are growing pains. Larger networks will be more stable, the logistics kinks worked out, and will (hopefully) be more financially stable. 

Companies can also work this out using real swap station data, identifying which areas are the areas seeing increasing demand in real time, and then allocating assets accordingly.

Several reports document the battery shortage and wait times at several swap stations of some electric motorcycle companies in Kenya. Bernard Masila covers this situation here and Brian Ambani covers it here. The biggest takeaway for me in all this is that the business case has been proven. Riders are keen to switch to electric motorcycles in their thousands as more riders start to appreciate the lower total cost of ownership associated with going electric. The startups involved in this are working as hard and as fast as they can to ramp up capacity and to meet demand, but the key issue is that in order to operate an efficient and effective battery swap network on an energy as a service model, these companies have to invest a lot of capital upfront!  This is where big investors and funders now need to come in and invest big to take advantage of this captive market and supercharge Kenya’s electric motorcycle sector.

Several companies are now ramping up operations now, so we are not talking about pilot projects here. We are way past that stage! Time for investors to lock in, do their due diligence, and get this sector to the next level. The time for this is now. We risk frustrating riders to the extent of shunning electric motorcycles when the teething problems being experienced now can be solved immediately with adequate funding rounds to help these companies scale effectively and efficiently. 

 

 

Photos: Some electric motorcycles in Nairobi, Kenya. Images by Remeredzai