BasiGo and Rubis Are Putting Public EV Fast Chargers at Petrol Stations Along Kenya’s Highways

BasiGo and Rubis Energy Kenya have started building a network of fast electric vehicle (EV) chargers at petrol stations along some of Kenya’s busiest roads. The first site is already running at the Rubis Sabaki station in Athi River, just outside Nairobi. Three more are set to open this month in Meru, Nanyuki, and Nyeri, all towns in central Kenya.

The idea behind the deal is straightforward. Until now, most of Kenya’s public EV charging has sat inside Nairobi. If you wanted to drive an electric car between towns, or run an electric bus on an intercity route, there were few places to plug in along the way. This partnership is meant to start closing those gaps on the corridors that link Nairobi to the rest of the country.

Who the two companies are

BasiGo is a Nairobi startup that assembles, sells, and finances electric buses. We covered it back when it flagged off its first electric buses in Nairobi in 2022, and more recently when it began assembling electric vans locally. Its buses are offered through a mileage-based leasing plan, the same “Pay-As-You-Drive” model we explained when KCB started financing bus operators to buy them. BasiGo says it runs the largest network of DC fast chargers for EVs in East Africa, built mainly to keep its own bus fleet on the road.

Rubis Energy Kenya is one of the country’s biggest fuel retailers. It is the third largest by market share and runs more than 300 service stations under the Rubis, Kenol, and Kobil brands. Frédéric Maupetit took over as its managing director in May 2026, with the outgoing boss, Olivier Sabrié, moving up to run the group’s East and Southern Africa operations.

What is actually new here

The important detail is who these chargers are for. BasiGo’s existing chargers mostly sit at bus depots and serve its buses. The Rubis sites are open to the public. Any compatible electric car, van, truck, or bus can pull in and charge. This is the first time BasiGo’s charging technology is being placed inside a large retail fuel network that ordinary drivers already use every day.

It is not BasiGo’s first tie-up with a fuel retailer. Late in 2025 it partnered with Vivo Energy on chargers hosted at Shell stations, including one in the same Athi River area. The Rubis deal is separate. It brings a second big retailer on board and pushes the model out of Nairobi and into central Kenya for the first time.

The chargers and the price

The Sabaki station uses 100kW DC fast chargers fitted with both CCS2 and GB/T connectors. Those are the two common plug standards used by different EV brands, so a single site can serve a wide mix of vehicles. BasiGo says a typical passenger car can charge in under an hour. All sites in the partnership will charge at an indicative rate of KES 48 per unit of electricity (per kWh).

That price is worth explaining, because it is not the same “cheap” charging figure often quoted for EVs in Kenya. KES 48 per unit is a retail price. It sits well above the special e-mobility tariff that Kenya Power offers registered charging operators, which runs at roughly KES 16 per unit at peak times and about KES 8 off-peak. The gap covers the cost of the chargers, installation, maintenance, and the retailer’s margin.

Even so, charging still works out cheaper than petrol per kilometre. Super petrol currently retails at KES 214.03 a litre in Nairobi. A petrol car doing about 12 kilometres to the litre spends close to KES 1,780 to cover 100 kilometres. An efficient electric car needing roughly 16 units of electricity over the same distance would spend about KES 770 at these stations. The saving is real, though the exact numbers shift with the vehicle and how it is driven.

Why a fuel company is selling electricity

Moses Nderitu, BasiGo’s managing director for Kenya, framed the reason for the partnership plainly. The question, he said, is no longer whether operators and the public want to go electric, but whether the charging is in place to support them at scale. Rubis, for its part, describes the deal as a step from selling fuel towards selling energy more broadly. Sabrié said Kenya is becoming a testing ground for that shift, and that the company expects to repeat it across the region.

There are good reasons Kenya is where this is being tried. More than 90% of the country’s electricity comes from renewable sources, mostly geothermal and hydropower, so EVs here run on comparatively clean power. Registered EVs have grown quickly, from under 800 in 2022 to more than 35,000 by the end of 2025, helped along by a National Electric Mobility Policy launched in February 2026.

What to watch

The barrier this partnership targets is a practical one. People and operators are far more willing to switch to electric when they can count on finding a charger where they need it, not just in Nairobi. Putting fast chargers at petrol stations that already sit on intercity routes is a direct way to build that confidence. Whether it actually speeds up adoption will come down to three things: how reliable the chargers turn out to be, how quickly the network grows beyond these first four sites, and whether the KES 48 rate holds steady as more drivers start plugging in.