After raising $45 million in February, GoCab, the mobility fintech that operates Yango’s largest fleet in Côte d’Ivoire, has handed over 100 fully electric cars to driver-partners in Abidjan. 

The deployment is the first half of a 200-vehicle programme and gives the company one of Africa’s largest operational fleets of electric ride-hailing cars. It also makes Côte d’Ivoire the current front-runner in a race that has, until now, mostly played out on two and three wheels.

“For a professional driver, fuel is not a minor expense. It is one of the highest daily costs of doing business,” Moulaye Tabouré, the country manager and managing director of GoCab Côte d’Ivoire, said in a statement. “Reducing that cost by 60% to 80% can fundamentally transform a driver’s economics.”

The vehicles will operate mainly on GOYA, Yango’s premium ride-hailing service in the country.

Fuel is one of the highest daily costs of the job for drivers working through Yango’s platform. GoCab is layering that saving onto its drive-to-own structure, under which drivers make regular payments from their ride-hailing income over three years, after which the vehicle transfers to them. This is a model similar to the one that drove Moove, a Nigerian mobility fintech, to a $2 billion valuation.

GoCab is betting on those savings to onboard drivers. A full charge costs about 8,000 FCFA ($14) and covers up to 470 kilometres, while a petrol or diesel vehicle burns through 20,000 to 40,000 FCFA ($35 to $70) in fuel to travel the same distance, according to the company’s operating benchmarks. 

That works out to roughly a 60% to 80% reduction in energy costs. Over 10,000 kilometres, a driver could keep between 255,000 and 681,000 FCFA (about $444 to $1,186) that would otherwise go to the pump.

This has led to a sharp rise in demand as over 300 existing GoCab drivers have already completed over two years in the programme and are expected to begin taking ownership from 2027, the company said. 

Yango’s contrarian bet is paying off in EVs first

The Abidjan handover fits inside a much larger Yango strategy. In May, Yango Africa CEO Adeniyi Adebayo told Bloomberg the Dubai-based company plans to invest at least $150 million in African expansion this year, targeting entry into 10 new markets. 

The new markets sit outside the Big Four of Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya, as the company focuses instead on secondary cities in West and Central Africa alongside Namibia, Botswana, and Mozambique.

That geographic choice is a byproduct of how Yango reads African economies. In a June interview with TechCabal, Adebayo argued that cities, rather than countries, drive African economic activity and that Yango’s expansion strategy treats them as the primary unit of analysis. 

Yango enters at the densest node of commercial activity in a market, builds it to profitability, then uses that cash flow to subsidise expansion into secondary and tertiary cities. Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire’s second-largest city, is the working proof, as Yango launched there in 2022, saw almost nothing for three years, and now counts it among its best-performing cities.

Côte d’Ivoire was the first market for Yango Motors, the group’s automotive arm, when the business launched at the Abidjan Auto Show in September 2025. GoCab’s 200-vehicle deployment is the first visible instalment of Yango’s EV pipeline in the country.

A different bet from the Lagos and Kigali playbooks

Africa’s electric mobility story has so far belonged to two- and three-wheelers, as they are cheaper, easier to charge, and slot into the informal economy that dominates most African cities.

In East Africa, the biggest EV mobility players are motorcycle operators. Ampersand runs over 4,000 electric motorcycles in Rwanda and more than 1,300 in Kenya, supported by 25 battery-swap stations, and announced in August 2025 that it planned to reach 13,000 motorcycles across East Africa by early 2026. 

Spiro, the largest player, has deployed over 100,000 electric motorcycles and 2,500 swap stations across seven African markets, but again, on two wheels.

Four-wheeler EV ride-hailing has been the harder segment to unlock because the vehicles cost more upfront, need higher-margin fares to pay back, and depend on a customer base willing to pay for premium rides. Most African markets have not been able to sustain that combination at scale.

GoCab’s 100-vehicle deployment does not match Ampersand’s or Spiro’s motorcycle fleets in unit count, but it operates in a different segment with different unit economics.

If GoCab’s Abidjan programme holds up on unit economics, Yango has a repeatable template for the West and Central African markets it is expanding into. If it does not, motorcycles will remain the only proven electric mobility category on the continent, and the four-wheeler bet will have to be shelved.

True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.