Toyota Sued Over Claims It An Electric Trike Startup It Once Funded

Yash BajajSun, June 21, 2026 at 4:30 PM UTC

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Toyota, while being the world's largest automaker, currently moving over 11 million vehicles a year, finds itself in a very different kind of battle in a California federal court. Defending its philanthropic arm against accusations of corporate piracy, Toyota finds itself the defendant in a lawsuit filed by Mobility for Africa (MFA), according to reports. The lawsuit, filed on May 12th, 2026, alleges that the Toyota Mobility Foundation (TMF) and its consulting partner, EXA Innovation Studio, misappropriated trade secrets, breached contracts, and committed fraud.

The "Hamba" Three-Wheeler

Mobility for Africa

The "Hamba", a rugged, solar-charged electric three-wheeler developed by MFA, is at the center of the dispute. Founded by UNICEF veteran Shantha Bloemen, MFA didn't just build a trike; the organization engineered a localized logistics ecosystem. The Hamba features an 880-pound payload capacity and uses off-grid battery swapping hubs tailored specifically for rural women farmers to transport goods to market. To date, MFA has deployed roughly 600 of these vehicles across Zimbabwe, with women accounting for up to 70 percent of the customer base.

The lawsuit outlines a classic David versus Goliath scenario, but with a modern intellectual property twist. According to the federal complaint, TMF initially approached MFA as a partner, providing approixmately $380,000 in grant funding in 2019. MFA claims this partnership was a Trojan horse. The enterprise alleges that TMF and EXA used their access to extract MFA's proprietary operational data, technical blueprints, and localized business models.

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Mobility for Africa

Rather than scaling MFA's existing network, TMF and EXA abruptly cut ties and launched their own identical venture in Kenya called Songa Mobility. Songa's value proposition is that it is deploying "Africanized eTrikes", solar charging hubs, and battery swapping infrastructure for rural farmers. Sounds suspiciously familiar. The plaintiffs allege that the defendants are now using MFA's own operational data to compete directly for the same pool of international grant funding, effectively starving the original creators of critical capital.

Legal Struggles

"Toyota was happy to learn from our years of work building off-grid rural e-mobility in Zimbabwe," Bloemen stated following the filing. "But rather than investing in African entrepreneurs who built it, they chose to copy, replicate, and control what we created." Toyota is already facing intense scrutiny stateside from environmental groups lobbying against stricter emissions regulations and lagging in its rollout of battery-electric vehicles. Now, its foundational arm is accused of treating grassroots African innovation as an open-source R&D lab for its own PR gains.

Mobility for Africa

Representatives for the TMF have yet to file a formal legal response to the claims, but as the EV race intensifies globally, the case raises a critical question regarding corporate accountability - when multinational automakers look to the Global South, are they looking for partners, or just innovation to claim as their own?

This story was originally published by Autoblog on Jun 21, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Autoblog as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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