Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Ethiopia’s First Hyundai Electric Car Goes to PM Abiy Ahmed as Gift
Ethiopia assembled its first Hyundai electric car

PM Abiy Ahmed on a test drive of Hyundai electric car assembled in Ethiopia. Haile Gebreselasie riding with the PM. (Photo : EBC)

Borkena
July 27, 2020

Marathon Motors, whose owner is Haile Gebreselassie, has assembled its first Hyundai electric car.  And the long-distance legend presented the car as a gift to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

According to state media, Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation, it is Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed himself who requested the company to start assembling electric cars.

It is said that the car’s battery could be charged anywhere, and no need to go to a charging station.

“…this morning I was happy to receive the first electric car fully assembled in Ethiopia by Marathon Motors. No emissions cars help reduce pollution in our growing cities,” Abiy Ahmed wrote on his social media page.

In a ceremony organized at the palace to hand over the car, Athlete Haile Gebresellasie said the production of an electric car could help save foreign currency needed for the purchase of oil.

Marathon Motor Engineering was launched in 2009 as an importer and distributor of Hyundai passenger, commercial vehicles, and parts in Ethiopia.

Earlier in this month, his resort properties in Shashemene and Batu towns of Ethiopia estimated to be hundreds of millions of birr, were destroyed as radical ethnic Oromo nationalists unleashed a war mostly non-ethnic Oromo Ethiopians under the cover of “protesting the killing of Hachalu Hundessa.”

His investment, now destroyed, employed hundreds of youth in the region. “The property is not just mine. It is the property of other Ethiopians too,” he remarked after his investment in those towns was destroyed.

In April of this year, his agri-business investment in Tepi, South Ethiopia, worth 28 million birr was vandalized by radical groups.

Haile Gebreselassie himself was born and raised in Arsi the area where followers of Ethiopian Orthodox Church were beheaded in the days following the assassination of Hachalu Hundessa.

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