Coffee with: Zach Faizal, founder of Peec Mobility: Faizal (LinkedIn) founded EV startup PeecMobility in 2019 to help the region avoid the mass scrapping of existing internal combustion engine vehicles and lessen the need to manufacture new electric vehicles to replace them. Peec says its tech costs 30% less and requires 80% less manufacturing time than its new counterparts. The EV startup unveiled the UAE’s first petrol-to-electric repurposed vehicle during COP28 last month.

We had a brief chat with Faizal about how Peec’s EV repurposing technology works, how it can benefit the growing EV industry across different markets, the company’s recycling strategies, industry challenges with the supply chains, and possible future agreements for expansion.

Edited and condensed excerpts of our conversation follow.

Enterprise: How does Peec’s EV building process work?

Zach Faizal: The concept is very simple. We bypass the most complex part of the manufacturing — the chassis — and produce electric cars by reusing the chassis and adding in battery packs, the software that runs the cars, and all of the other mechanical components that need to be fitted into the existing chassis.

We have 1.6 mn cars on the road, and a lot of these chassis have been made for the past century or so by big reputable original equipment manufacturers, so they last for 25 to 30 years. That’s why you still see cars on the road from the 80s and 90s that are still perfectly fine on the road.

Bee’ah is our strategic partner for all of the projects that we carry out and they own one of the biggest recycling plants in the region. They will recycle all of the components that we remove from the existing vehicles and the battery packs that are brought back after their end-of-life, thereby closing the full circular economy with them.

E: Have you faced any supply chain issues?

ZF: One of the values that we bring to the table in this part of the region is that we develop our battery packs, so we don’t buy battery packs from abroad. We buy the cells and we convert them to packs here, eliminating some supply chain issues. We also have very strong supply partners on board as well, so fortunately we haven’t had any issues with the supply chain.

E: Any plans to expand outside the UAE?

ZF:We’ve been working with multiple governments around the world because our tech is scalable and can apply to any major city. We’ve been in talks with the Italian Transportation Ministry and with the UK government to repurpose their public buses to electric and we started building prototypes for that. We’re also looking at some of the developing markets like Kenya, which is very interested in the technology. We will deploy the initial set of vehicles in the UAE by the end of 2024, then start looking to expand to other geographies.

We’re in the process of fundraising as we speak. Over the next couple of months and once we secure the final round of investment, we will be announcing who the official investors are.

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