Our Vision

Mobius Motors designs, manufactures and sells highly functional, highly affordable vehicles as a transportation platform empowering local entrepreneurs to mobilise the developing world.

We empower entrepreneurial buyers with business advice and financing to use their Mobius cars as a platform to operate limitless transport services to lower income end-users. The range of business-in-a-box services is vast from public transport, to mobile medical care, to consumer goods distribution. These endogenous businesses will create systemic change in the capacity and utility of Africa’s transport network, connecting the continent to hospitals, schools, markets and employment in even the most remote rural areas. Our vision is a more mobile, more prosperous Africa.

The Problem

Africa’s poorest are largely immobile. Without appropriate transport services millions struggle everyday (often walking 10+ miles) to access basic life supplies and services such clean drinking water, farming inputs, schools, hospitals and jobs. Chronic government underinvestment in roads and public transit further restricts mobility. Africa's most disadvantaged cannot afford to buy a vehicle but need relevant transport services to prosper.

Effective transport services are dependent on the appropriateness of vehicles themselves. While the transport market in Africa is vast at $60bn annually (WRI), industry supply is disconnected with 98% of cars imported (UN & OICA). The hundreds of buyers and transport service end-users we surveyed across Kenya need affordable and functional modes of transport, yet most vehicles across the continent are simply not designed for this demand.

Without fundamental change in Africa's vehicles and underpinning transport network, millions of its most disadvantaged people will remain isolated from the transformative improvements that effective mobility supports.

Our Solution

To serve African market demand we re-imagine the car. We heavily simplify our product by excluding costly technologies such as air con, interior fixtures and even glass windows while maximising function with relevant suspension, handling and storage. We also simplify our process by integrating off-the-shelf parts within a durable and safe tubular steel frame. The result, a vehicle with the key functionality of an off-road car (fit for travelling long distances on bumpy dirt roads) sold at a similar price point to the ubiquitous urban 3-wheel motorised rickshaw, which cannot travel long distances effectively.

Mobius aims to empower transport entrepreneurs across Africa not just with more appropriate vehicles, but with the financing and business advice needed to operate a sustainable transport centric business. As well as leveraging the existing privatised public transport model (already proven by auto rickshaws and minivans), entrepreneurial buyers can also use their modular Mobius cars to operate a range of other services such as local school buses, mail delivery or mobile medical care.

The endogenous growth of transport businesses such as these will create systemic change in the capacity and utility of Africa’s transport network.