As the West surges toward electric cars, here’s where the unwanted gas guzzlers

Cotonou, Benin
CNN
 — 

Standing on the stony ground in the bustling Fifa Park car lot, Rokeeb Yaya is haggling over the price of a dark red car. It is one of a couple hundred vehicles, parked in long lines stretching out across the vast lot – some shiny and new-looking, others dented and dusty.

The car Yaya has his eye on, a 2008 US-built Ford Escape, is on sale for around $4,000. It’s relatively affordable – US cars are cheaper than most other brands in the lot – and he wants to upgrade from his motorbike to a car. He is not interested in the history of the vehicle, he said, only that he can afford it.

But how this Ford ended up here – in one of the biggest car lots in the port city of Cotonou – helps tell a bigger story about how many of the West’s gas-guzzling cars are starting second lives in West Africa.

The 14-year old Ford arrived in Benin from the United States last year, after being sold at an auto auction.

Car records reviewed by CNN show it had three previous owners in Virginia and Maryland, and has logged over 252,000 miles on the road. It had one previous recall for its power steering, but unlike some of the other cars on the lot, it arrived in a relatively sound condition – it hadn’t been in any reported accidents.

This aging SUV is just one of millions of used cars that arrive every year in West Africa from wealthy countries such as Japan, South Korea, European countries and, increasingly, the US. Many of these end up in Benin, one of Africa’s top importers of used vehicles.

The stream of used cars heading to West African ports is only expected to increase with the West’s shift to electric vehicles. As wealthy countries set aggressive goals to move consumers towards electric vehicles to cut planet-warming pollution, gas-powered cars won’t necessarily go away.

Instead, many will be shipped thousands of miles away to developing countries like Benin, where populations are growing, along with demand for used cars.

Experts say the effect will be to divert climate and environmental problems to countries that are the most vulnerable to the climate crisis, undermining their own attempts to cut planet-warming pollution.

The global market for used light-duty vehicles grew nearly 20% from 2015 to 2019, when more than 4.8 million were exported. There was a slight dip in exports in 2020 when the Covid pandemic started, but numbers are now “growing quite rapidly,” United Nations Environment Programme official Rob de Jong told CNN.

The US exports about 18% of the world’s used vehicles, according to UNEP data. These travel all over the globe, including to the Middle East and Central America, but many go to Nigeria, Benin and Ghana.

Some of these are salvaged cars that have been in accidents, were flooded, or are just too old – which get auctioned off for parts. Others are whole used cars that US car dealers are looking to offload.

“A lot of them are going to be two- to five-year-old Hyundais, Toyotas, sedans,” said Dmitriy Shibarshin, marketing director for West Coast Shipping, a company that specializes in shipping cars internationally. “It’s mostly the economy cars that get shipped there.”

Shibarshin’s company and others are “like FedEx” for cars, he said. His company usually specializes in higher-end vehicles, but also ships cheaper cars.

In major African countries like Kenya and Nigeria, more than 90% of the cars and trucks are used vehicles from overseas. In Kenya, where de Jong is based, the vehicle fleet has doubled every eight years; streets that used to be devoid of cars are now jammed with…