Tukzie is a University of Cape Town-led electric-mobility initiative, bringing together academics, technical staff, undergraduate students and postgraduate researchers. Together we design, build and test a fully electric tuk-tuk — chassis, battery, firmware and all.
Tukzie began with a question nobody in the room could answer: what would low-cost electric transport look like if it were engineered here, for here — rather than imported and adapted?
The tuk-tuk was the obvious platform. It already moves people and goods across the continent every day. Making it electric, serviceable and locally buildable is the whole project. Everything on this site — every weld, wire and line of firmware — was produced through close collaboration between academic supervisors, technical staff and the students building it alongside their degrees.
Build a working electric tuk-tuk that any local workshop could service — and prove it on real roads.
Not a concept. Not a render. A vehicle that starts on a cold morning, carries a load up Rhodes Drive, and can be repaired with tools a technician already owns.
Designs, test data and failures are published, not polished away. A result nobody can reproduce is not a result.
Parts are sourced locally wherever they exist. Every imported component is a future repair someone cannot make.
Every subsystem is owned by a student who has to defend it. The vehicle is the assessment.
Electric mobility that is designed, built and maintained on the continent — not imported into it.
In the long term, Tukzie is less a vehicle than a template: a way of training engineers who can take a sustainable transport platform from research question to road-legal prototype without leaving the country to do it.
See the research programmeNineteen workstreams across programme steering, vehicle engineering, power systems, digital integration and technical implementation — including the areas where collaboration is inevitable.