The Pakistani startup designing EVs from scratch

Boredom, engineering, and a gap nobody else was filling

The episode opens with Muzamil explaining that he has known Shah Talha for roughly four years through Facebook, and that seeing what Talha had been building recently made him reach out immediately. “I saw that and I was like — I need to have this conversation,” he says. Talha and Najeebullah flew in from Karachi to sit down for the conversation.

The first question Muzamil puts to them is the obvious one: why go through the trouble of designing and manufacturing an electric vehicle in Pakistan when you could simply go to China, put your name on an existing OEM product, and start selling? Talha’s answer is disarmingly direct. “I’ll start with the short answer — boredom.” He then adds the longer version: their background is in engineering and design, not trading, and they believe Pakistan’s specific mobility problems cannot be answered by products designed for other markets. Najeebullah reinforces this: if you have the mindset of a designer in Pakistan, there is almost nowhere to apply it. “There is no job. No opportunities, no R&D, no industry.” Engineers either leave or end up in maintenance roles. Mode Mobility was, in part, an attempt to create the kind of work that should exist but doesn’t.

Formula Student: where the partnership was forged

Both founders met at PNEC, the Pakistan Navy Engineering College in Karachi, and the real bond between them was built through Formula Student — an international competition where university teams design, manufacture, and race a formula-style car from scratch. Najeebullah led the team; Talha started as a marketing executive and worked his way up. They competed for four years, travelling to the UK event each time.

The competition is worth dwelling on because it shaped everything that came after. Najeebullah describes German and Dutch teams running experimental technology — one university, Delft, makes its own tyre compound, its own centreless wheel, and its own motors. A company called AMK manufactures custom motors specifically for top Formula Student teams. “Formula E is not the pinnacle of electric motorsport — it’s Formula Student,” Najeebullah recalls reading at the time Formula E launched. The competition is, at its core, a real-world engineering environment where students have to manage cost, schedules, manufacturing, and business simultaneously. It is also where both founders learned that Pakistani industry is more capable than it looks: suspension components, prop shafts, and CV joints were all manufactured locally through workshops and automotive suppliers. “There is a huge automotive industry here and a lot of the components on Pakistani-made cars are actually made in Pakistan. The only thing is that we’re not making our own cars — we’re making someone else’s designs.”

Najeebullah’s path after graduation included a deliberate detour. He famously failed his entrepreneurship course because he was spending all his time in the garage. “I failed entrepreneurship and I was like, okay, this is an opportunity, not a crisis.” He then did a master’s in automotive engineering at RMIT in Australia, worked with the RMIT electric racing team, and returned to Pakistan to teach mechatronics and mechanical engineering at DHSOFA and Zabist universities. Talha, meanwhile, joined an advertising firm and later co-founded a separate company, Trademore, with a third partner named Shayan. It was Shayan who eventually connected the two again, and it was Talha who convinced Najeebullah to leave academia. “I knew his potential — he is one of its kind in Pakistan.”

Why two-wheelers, and why now

The original idea in 2019 was more modest: design a car aesthetically, 3D-print a model, take it to a car show, and see if they could raise funding. COVID gave them time to think more carefully. They moved from four wheels to two for a straightforward reason: two-wheelers have the lowest execution risk and the biggest impact in Pakistan’s actual mobility landscape.

The numbers make the case. Pakistan’s motorbike market is roughly three million units a year. Cars are under 300,000. “It’s ten times bigger,” Talha notes, “and in that market you don’t have a product that is accessible to women.” The long-term plan is two-wheelers first, then three-wheelers, then buses — which Najeebullah describes as “relatively easy” — and eventually a car. Baby steps, in a market where the engineering ecosystem is still being built.

The C series: what they’ve actually built

Mode Mobility has designed four to five two-wheelers so far and has a production prototype of one — the C series, launched the month before this conversation. Muzamil asks the obvious follow-up: is it actually made in Pakistan? “Definitely. It’s manufactured in Pakistan, designed by us — completely unique design.”

The two major imported components are the electric motor and the battery cells. Everything else is locally sourced or assembled. Battery cells are imported from China because the economies of scale for cell manufacturing simply do not exist in Pakistan yet, but the battery pack itself is assembled locally. The motor and battery come in two sizes each, creating four SKUs spread across a price range that maps roughly to the 125–150 cc petrol bike segment. If a comparable petrol bike is one-x in price, the C series sits between 1.6x and 2.2x — more expensive upfront, but with significantly lower running costs.

Muzamil raises Jolta, a company that electrified an existing petrol bike design without changing the body. His frustration is pointed: “The world has moved on. You had an opportunity and you took that exact bike, kept the same space where the petrol engine was, and added a battery underneath in a way that makes no sense from a design perspective.” Talha and Najeebullah decline to comment directly on competitors, but the implicit contrast with their own approach is clear.

The battery-removal decision and the swapping future

One of the more considered engineering choices in the C series is that the battery is removable. You do not plug the bike into a socket — you take the battery out and charge it from any standard switch. This was not accidental. Najeebullah explains that swapping infrastructure cannot exist without a fleet, and a fleet cannot exist without bikes. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation.” By making the battery removable from day one, Mode ensures that when swapping stations eventually arrive, existing customers can use them without modifying their bikes.

The business model implications extend further. Najeebullah describes a rent-to-own model where customers pay a monthly fee that eventually transfers ownership, and a subscription model where the battery is never sold — only the bike is — and customers pay per charge cycle, equivalent to what they would spend on fuel. “Once the battery problem is solved, which is something the entire world is working on right now, that’s something that’s going to eventually come down here.”

The B2B case is also compelling. Muzamil draws the parallel to IoT, which promised to transform homes but actually took off in corporate settings where the cost savings were measurable. The same logic applies here: a food delivery rider covering a two-kilometre radius in F-7 Islamabad all day has far more to gain from switching to electric than a casual user. “The person using the bike for thirty minutes a day — how much are they saving? The person using it for eight hours a day — their cost reduction is enormous.” Najeebullah agrees, and adds that battery swapping at a delivery hub — where riders return between runs — makes the operational model even cleaner.

The women’s mobility market and the design compromise

The core USP, as Talha frames it, is inclusion. Fifty percent of Pakistan’s population has effectively no access to the country’s dominant mode of transport. The C series is a step-through design — scooter-like in its geometry — so that someone in an abaya, a burka, or a shalwar kameez can ride it without difficulty. “It’s just like riding a bicycle. If you can ride a cycle, you can ride it.”

But the team made a conscious decision not to make the bike look feminine, because that would attach a limiting connotation to the product and create a market bias. The result is a bike that reads as neutral. When they floated a registration-of-interest form and mentioned the women’s focus in the accompanying article, 93% of responses came from men. “They want it,” Talha says. The design worked.

There is also a regulatory angle. With a one-kilowatt motor, the bike falls under the 50 cc equivalent threshold and is classified as a cycle — no licence required, no vehicle registration. This opens the product to school-going children, to households with one car and six people, and to anyone living in a gated community who needs short-range mobility without the bureaucratic overhead.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil presses on the scooter question directly — he admits he personally would not buy a scooter even if it were cheaper, because of the feel. Talha confirms this was a deliberate engineering and cultural decision: “We want to make a scooter-like thing where you have space in front of the seat so people in longer clothes can ride it — but it shouldn’t be seen as a feminine product.”

Funding, policy gaps, and the hardware problem

Mode is currently self-funded through Trademore, the co-founders’ other company. They are looking for pre-seed investment but want to reach post-revenue first so they have a real business case to show. They are also part of an accelerator with California-based advisors.

The policy environment creates a specific structural problem. Pakistan’s EV subsidies — sales tax at one percent, customs duty at one percent — are available only to manufacturers, not design firms. “The world works by having a design firm that gives contract manufacturing to someone else. But in this case, we cannot avail those subsidies unless we are a manufacturer.” This forced Mode to set up a joint-venture company with a manufacturing partner just to access incentives that, in most markets, would be available to the design layer of the supply chain.

On the VC side, every investor they have met has been interested but unwilling to commit. “Hardware startups are a much more difficult sell. Every VC we met said — we’ve maybe done one hardware play in our lives.” Talha is pragmatic about it: the answer is grants, design-services revenue (Mode already earns from selling product design work, mostly to clients outside Pakistan), and partnerships with specialists in swapping infrastructure, sales, and financing rather than trying to own every layer themselves.

The window that is open right now

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and the two founders converge on a point that feels like the real argument underneath everything else. Electric vehicle technology is still being developed. The dynamics of who dominates are not yet set. In combustion engines, Japan and Germany locked in their advantages decades ago and the barriers to entry became enormous. In electric, China is ahead, Indian startups are moving fast, and the technology is accessible to anyone willing to learn it now. “If this technology matures — which will happen, eventually — access to that space would be much more difficult,” Najeebullah says. “There is this window open where technology is accessible and everybody is learning and developing. You can actually compete with them or get on par with them.”

The export ambition follows from this. Mode’s plan is to perfect the product domestically, roll out nationally, then address the region — Africa and the Middle East are specifically mentioned as markets with high utility demand and a price point that Pakistani manufacturing costs can meet — and eventually Europe and the US.

Muzamil closes by asking both founders how they see Pakistan in 2050. Talha is hopeful, pointing to the country’s young population and the opportunities that creates. Najeebullah is more conditional: “It will be what the youth make of it. We do a lot of stupid things as well. We have to be conscious that whatever we’re doing takes Pakistan to a point where we want to see it in thirty years.”