BEN AROUS — Bako Motors shipped twenty electric vehicles to Germany on Friday, the first time a Tunisian-built electric vehicle has been exported to that market. The batch left the company's plant in the El Mghira industrial zone in the governorate of Ben Arous, in the presence of Trade and Export Development Minister Samir Abid and Ben Arous governor Abdelhamid Boukadida.
Germany is not the company's first export destination — Bako already sells in Italy, France, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — but it is the first to open after the firm obtained European ECE type approval a few weeks ago, making it, by its own account, the first Tunisian electric vehicle manufacturer to hold that certification.
The company has set out a trajectory: 88 vehicles exported by the end of 2026, and 800 in 2027.
Why type approval is the actual news
The twenty vehicles matter less than the paperwork that made them shippable. European type approval is the gate that separates a manufacturer selling into markets that will take a vehicle on national terms from one that can sell across the single market. Obtaining it requires meeting a homologation standard on safety, emissions and construction that most small manufacturers in the region never attempt.
Dorra El Borji, director-general of foreign trade, put the local content of Bako's vehicles above 40 percent, citing Tunisian-made electrical cables, aluminium, some textiles and various industrial parts. That figure is the second thing worth noting. Tunisia's automotive sector — around 280 companies and some 95,000 jobs, with exports of 3.9 billion dollars in 2025, second in Africa — has been built almost entirely on components made to another manufacturer's specification. A finished vehicle with 40 percent local content is a different position in the value chain.
The gap between 20 and 800
The stated plan requires multiplying export volume by a factor of forty in eighteen months. Bako employs 68 people and says it has sold more than 400 vehicles on the Tunisian market since it was founded.
Two things have to happen simultaneously for the 2027 number to hold. Production has to scale, which for a firm of this size means capital, floor space and a supplier base able to hold quality at volume. And the demand has to be repeat demand: a first shipment accompanied by a minister is a marketing event; an order book is a commercial relationship. Nothing published so far indicates whether the German consignment is a pilot or the first draw on a standing contract.
The domestic context is not neutral either. Tunisia has been promoting electric vehicles with incentives, but La Presse reported on the same day that owners face non-functioning charging points, queues and power cuts. A manufacturer whose home market cannot reliably charge its product has a structural reason to export — and a weak domestic base from which to finance the expansion.
What would de-risk it
The measures usually proposed for exactly this transition are known. Industry bodies point to supplier development programmes that qualify local firms to the tier-one standard European buyers require, so that the 40 percent local content figure rises rather than becoming a ceiling. Export credit and guarantee instruments matter at this stage too: the working capital gap between building 800 vehicles and being paid for them is where firms of this size typically fail, and it is a gap public export finance is designed to bridge.
The state has already committed to the sector — a 1.3 billion dinar Automotive Smart City project, and targets of 14 billion dinars in component exports and 150,000 jobs by 2027. Whether Bako's 800 figure is reached will be a reasonable early indicator of whether that framework produces manufacturers or only assemblers.