TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - President Joko `Jokowi` Widodo announced that PT Wijaya Manufacturing plans to produce 60,000 electric-powered motorcycles in 2019. The company is a collaboration between state-owned enterprise Wijaya Karya Industri dan Konstruksi and private firm Gesits Technologies Indo.
The president took the opportunity to test ride a prototype unit, that will eventually be mass-produced for the Indonesian market, within the Presidential Palace Complex. Jokowi claimed it would truly be “100 percent Indonesian-made.”
“We discussed matters related to the production,” said President Jokowi during his meeting with stakeholders comprising of the company itself, the Surabaya Institute of Technology, and the Research and Higher Education Minister Muhammad Nasir.
Read: Jokowi Visits Market on His Custom Built Street Tracker
Previously, during the Electric Car Seminar and Exhibition on July 31, Minister of Industry Airlangga Hartarto claimed that the ministry once developed an electric-powered motorcycle during the 1990s and successfully exported it to a number of countries.
According to Airlangga, electric motorcycles are nothing new for Indonesian experts, in addition to the fact that the country houses two raw material sources of the battery production; cobalt and nickel.
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