Taking Things Apart and Fixing Them
Nishimachi alumnus
Taiei Harimoto ’02 uses his passion for engineering to help people and the environment
by Michael S. Strickland
“For fun, I like fixing broken things,” says Taiei Harimoto, head of mechanical engineering at Ampersand E-Mobility in Kigali, Rwanda. In addition to household appliances like air conditioners, refrigerators, radios, and whatnot that occasionally need looking after, Taiei explains that he also keeps the family car and the two motorcycles he and his wife Samara ride in working order.
“To be honest,” Taiei admits, “I like the old-school mechanical bikes. They’re complex pieces of machinery that are a bit finicky, but if you get everything right, they’re very satisfying. Electric bikes are easier to drive — you just touch the throttle and off you go — and petrol bikes are more involved, but riding them’s a different kind of fun.”
What Taiei does for fun sounds a lot like what he does for work — using software to virtually take apart, reassemble, and improve mechanical and electronic devices, specifically the electric motorcycle and battery his current employer produces locally in Kigali. “I guess that started way back then with fixing the broken CD player at Nishimachi,” he laughs.
Not a traditional academic thing
“At Nishimachi,” Taiei recalls, “I wasn’t the typical studious kid who was clearly going to succeed in some academic or intellectual direction. But different teachers found things I was passionate about and they were able to help me use that and help me as a student. They helped me find my place.”
Taiei found one such place after the CD player in the Nishimachi middle-school music room broke. “At the time,” Taiei explains, “I liked gathering old electronics, playing around with them and taking them apart, seeing if I could fix them. They were usually just junk people threw out. But this was super cool because it was a quality CD player. And I took it apart and fixed it.”
Science teacher David Green was “super impressed,” Taiei recalls. “He offered to set up a little space in his room for me to take things apart and document and share what I was learning. While not a traditional academic thing, he thought it was an important form of learning, I guess. So that a hobby which to me just felt like fun — he saw the value in it, and recognized and encouraged it.”
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Taiei Harimoto ‘02 working with Ampersand in Rwanda
A different kind of fun
James McKinnon, the middle-school science teacher, helped Taiei supplement the mechanical side of things with computer skills. “I wasn’t doing great in his class,” Taiei remembers, “but he did a great job of making the subject fun. He recognized that I had certain interests — I kind of dove into HTML coding and website building and making GIFs and such — interests that he encouraged and helped me to grow.”
Going all out
Tara Sharkey, one of Nishimachi’s middle-school English teachers, also saw the value and growth potential in another of Taiei’s interests. “She saw that if I was interested in something,” he recalls, “I kind of went all out. At the time I was really interested in making little videos. I was doing this by myself just for fun. And she told me, ‘Look, you can present what you’re studying in any format you like. It doesn’t have to be a written book report. If you want to do a video, do a video. Just actually read the book.’ That was the motivation I needed.” The green light to share his learning with a camcorder instead of a pen gave Taiei a new take on
reading. “I was really excited,” he explains, “since I had recently asked my parents to get a computer that could read video, which was new at the time. I had to plug in a big VHS sort of thing, but it could upload video and then I had some video-editing software that I was playing with. I did a dramatic reenactment of one of the key scenes of the book. It had little transitions and special effects. For a seventh-grader, I think the production quality was pretty good.”
Transitions
Taiei continued producing video book reports throughout the rest of his Nishimachi years. But in the summer between eighth and ninth grades, Taiei’s father Paul was transferred by his company to Westchester County, New York. The whole family went along too. Taiei, his younger brother Taiga ’08, and their mother Ruth, who had worked until then as the Nishimachi nurse, settled down in Scarsdale. Instead of attending one of the excellent public high schools there, however, Taiei went to The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, a village sandwiched between the Hudson and Saw Mill rivers.
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Taiei engaged in his “fun”, fixing everyday items in need of repair.
Photos of Taiei from Nishimachi’s Ayumi yearbook during his middle school years.
“The move was decided pretty late,” Taiei says, “and we didn’t have an address when the school year started. So I ended up going to a private school.” Yet despite its relaxed suburban setting, the school did not have Nishimachi’s easy-going conviviality.
“That was probably the toughest transition for me,” Taiei recalls, “going from Nishimachi where I felt like I was known and appreciated by everyone, to being this random Asian kid in a much larger school. Academics weren’t the problem — to be honest, it was easy, those first couple years. It was just socially a tough new environment to get used to.”
After two years in New York, Paul Harimoto was transferred back to Tokyo, so for grades eleven and twelve, Taiei went to the American School in Japan, which he found socially more familiar than, but just as academically uncomplicated as The Masters School. “I was very well prepared for high school,” Taiei says, “having been helped and redirected by the teachers at Nishimachi. I discovered that if I applied myself, I could do these things.”
In addition to applying himself to schoolwork, Taiei continued to pursue his passions outside of high school — making videos, playing around with computers, taking things apart and fixing them — passions that helped him become the engineer he is today.
“Stanford is where I was inspired to see that, what used to just be hobbies I did for fun,” Taiei recalls, “is actually something you can make a career out of. And the transition there was so much easier than the transition to high school in New York. Stanford
is very diverse and I also found a lot of like-minded people there. And a lot of connections to Japan. I was even in the same class as Arthur Kaneko [Nishimachi ’02].”
At Stanford, Taiei took a course called Design for Extreme Affordability. “It’s a multi-disciplinary, multiquarter class,” Taiei explains, “so it takes up a ton of your time. But you work with these global partners who are developing solutions to problems all over the world. That’s where I saw that you can apply engineering towards pressing problems in the world and not just towards things like designing the next iPhone.”
Yangon days
One of the global partners Taiei worked with was Proximity Designs, a company that markets products to farmers in Myanmar. “I got to go to Myanmar as a student,” Taiei says. “I was really inspired by Proximity’s team there.”
Three years after graduating from Stanford with his mechanical engineering degree, Taiei returned to Yangon, Myanmar, as a design fellow for Proximity in 2012. He became a product design engineer in 2013, during which time he worked on prototyping, testing, and redesigning Proximity’s low-pressure drip irrigation system. From 2014 to 2017 he was product design manager, working on a solar-powered irrigation system designed specifically to meet the needs and pockets of smallholder farmers in Myanmar, helping to make their farming practices more sustainable and more profitable by reducing labor-time and increasing yields.
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Collaborating locally to ensure a successful outcome
Taiei and his colleagues proudly displaying their product from Proximity Designs, while working in Myanmar
It was when he was working on this project, in 2015, that he met his future wife Samara. “She was working for the United Nations,” Taiei recalls, “on a project highlighting businesses with a sustainable impact focus. She was facilitating a film crew that came to Proximity’s factory in Yangon, so I gave them the tour.”
Some time later, when Taiei’s roommate invited Samara, via a mutual friend in Thailand, to join them for dinner, Taiei was playfully reminded that he had in fact already met Samara. “I had totally forgotten about meeting her before,” Taiei laughs. “My excuse was that I had been in work mode — I gave tours of the company pretty regularly.”
Despite the rewarding work they were doing in Myanmar, however, after six years there both Taiei and Samara wanted a change. “This was back in April 2019,” Taiei recalls, “before COVID, before the coup. Some things are tough about living there and we both felt like we needed a break from Myanmar. So we quit our jobs.” By then he was head of Proximity’s internal product and service design team, coordinating and overseeing various of the company’s business units and projects.
He kept in touch with one of Proximity’s investors, the philanthropic investment wing of the software company Autodesk known as the Autodesk Foundation. “They have a huge impact portfolio of companies that they support,” Taiei explains, “some with direct investment, some with technology or even engineering.”
Part of Autodesk’s support includes donating the CAD and manufacturing software that Taiei and
others used at Proximity. “I reached out to them, saying, ‘Hey, are there other companies doing engineering impact work?’ And they connected me to a few that were looking to hire engineers, and Ampersand was one of them.”
The hilly roads of Rwanda
When Taiei moved to Kigali in September 2019 to join Ampersand as a senior mechanical engineer, the five-year-old startup was just beginning to ramp up commercial production of its electric motorcycles. Five had been introduced to the streets of Kigali in May, fifteen more would follow by the end of the year — a tiny fraction of the estimated 100,000 total in Rwanda — but already some 7000 drivers had joined the waiting list to get one.
Taiei explains that Ampersand markets its Kigalimade electric motorcycles specifically to motorcycle taxi drivers. “The majority of vehicles on the road in East Africa,” he says, “are these two-wheeled taxis. They are all ancient technology from the 1970s — carbureted, single-cylinder, air-cooled engines that are very dirty. And even though they’re small, 100 to 150 cc, they contribute disproportionately to the emissions here. So the opportunity for reducing emissions and dependence on fossil fuels is massive.”
But seizing this opportunity with existing e-moto technology simply wouldn’t work. “We’ve seen a lot of people make what we think is a mistake,” Taiei notes, “importing parts, vehicles, and batteries that were designed for a different market and just deploying them here and expecting that to work.”
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For instance, since motorcycle taxi drivers need to transport as many fares as possible each day, they have no interest in buying one of the existing electric motorcycles that can be plugged in at any outlet, but that take four hours to charge. So an easily swapped-out battery was required — as well as a robust vehicle powerful enough to transport driver and passengers up and down the hilly roads of Rwanda.
That ruled out vehicles similar to the scooters made by Taiwanese company Gogoro, which use batteries light enough to be swapped out at vending machines. “They’re focused on the personal, commuter use-case,” Taiei explains, “which is a very different use-case than ours. We had to learn the hard way that there doesn’t exist a product that’s fit for this market. We have to make it ourselves.”
Getting the details right
Using the CAD software donated by Autodesk, Taiei began working on helping to increase Ampersand’s fleet of Kigali-produced electric mototaxis to 35 by April 2021, 56 by November 2021, and — the company having expanded meanwhile into Nairobi, Kenya — to more than 800 by April 2023, with 60 in Nairobi, the rest in Kigali. He also worked on improving the efficiency and performance of both the vehicle and the battery it runs on, increasing the distance a bike can go on a single charge from about 50 kilometers to about 80 kilometers. “Assembly of our batteries happens here,” Taiei continues, “assembly of the vehicles as well. There’s also some fabrication, using raw steel, cutting and welding, all our designs. In production,
if a new welding fixture is needed to improve the fabrication process, my team here provides the engineering support for that.”
The swap mechanism of the battery needs to be worked on too. “It’s a complex system of software and mechanical structures and some electronics,” Taiei explains. “It’s the interface between the battery and the vehicle, the battery and the station. The team here works on making sure the battery swap happens as smoothly, safely and quickly as possible.”
In addition to managing the team involved in the local production of vehicles and batteries, Taiei also spends part of his time working remotely with Ampersand’s Berlin-based research and development team, using computer-aided design software and rapid prototyping facilities to develop the company’s next-generation battery.
“Right now we have about 1,500 batteries on the road,” Taiei says, “and we’ll be producing another two thousand or so in the coming months. After that, we want a different design to take us to a larger scale. It’s a project that likely will go on for about twelve months before it’s in mass production. So half the time, I’m working in CAD, exploring different mechanisms for the internals of the battery, getting the details right.”
Financial sense
The Ampersand e-motos are so attractive that there are now around 8000 people waiting to buy one. They’re attractive not just because they hap-
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pen to be electric — reducing emissions 75–95% compared to a 125 cc motorbike running on petrol — they’re also “cheaper to operate and easier to maintain,” Taiei says. “For any kind of mass-scale adoption of electric vehicles, it has to make sense financially to the end user.”
Much of that financial sense lies in the battery. “A key feature of our business model,” Taiei explains, “is that customers only buy the vehicle. They don’t buy the battery.” Instead, they exchange a depleted battery for a fresh one at an Ampersand swap station.
“So the opportunity for reducing emissions and dependence on fossil fuels is massive.”
One effect is that mototaxi drivers are motivated to make the switch from petrol to electric. Another is that workers from other fields are encouraged to become e-mototaxi drivers. “After farming,” Taiei says, “mototaxi driving is the second most common means of making a living in Rwanda. It’s tough work, but it’s better money than farming.”
“But seizing this opportunity with existing e-moto technology simply wouldn’t work. “We’ve seen a lot of people make what we think is a mistake,” Taiei notes, “importing parts, vehicles, and batteries that were designed for a different market and just deploying them here and expecting that to work.”
“The battery is actually more expensive than the vehicle,” Taiei continues. “But because it’s ours, we’re able to invest in one that will last longer — four, five, six years — and is able to be used in this heavy-duty commercial use-case, with no massive up-front cost to the customer. They just pay for the energy that they use, as opposed to having to take out a huge loan to pay for a battery. Right now, with twelve swap stations, we have full coverage of Kigali. And in Nairobi, the last I checked, we had eight stations, covering all of the central business district and all of the western side of the city.”
Since the 40-kilogram Ampersand battery can power an e-moto for 70–90 kilometers, it only needs to be swapped out once or twice over the course of the 160–190 kilometers typically covered by mototaxi drivers during their 13-hour working day. The amount paid for electricity, thus, ends up being less than the amount a driver would have paid for the several liters of fuel needed to cover the same distance on a regular motorcycle. In addition, with no oil and oil filters to change, no clutch to maintain or gears to synchronize, no carburetor to tweak, no muffler to adjust, and no spark plugs or fuel injector to replace, Ampersand e-motos cost less time and money to keep in working order.
E-mobility means social mobility
These reductions in maintenance/energy costs and downtime enable Ampersand e-moto drivers to take home more pay than drivers of conventional mototaxis, increasing their potential for savings and social mobility. “It’s one of the best options for upward mobility when you’re starting at the bottom,” Taiei says.
In addition, the Ampersand emoto’s ease of use allows people with no previous motorcycle experience to quickly learn how to drive them. “Whereas on a petrol bike,” Taiei explains, “you need all four limbs to be working — the left hand works the clutch, the right hand works the front brake and throttle, the left foot shifts gears, and the right foot works the rear brake — on our bike, it’s just one gear, no clutch, just throttle and brake. You can kind of ride with just one hand.”
Ampersand recently partnered with the German Agency for International Cooperation, GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), on a project aiming to improve the employment opportunities and livelihoods of women in Rwanda. “Motorcycle taxi-driving has traditionally been 99%
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The first taxi driver to adopt Ampersand innovative approach to powering high use vehicles for commercial purposes.
male-dominated,” Taiei says. “So we worked with GIZ, providing the vehicles and the resources to train female motorcycle taxi drivers. The ease of this bike was helpful because these were all new riders.”
Twenty-four women are currently driving Ampersand e-mototaxis in Kigali so that, combined with those who were already driving standard motorcycles, the total female mototaxi workforce in Rwanda is now 44 strong.
A vision of the future
Ampersand intends to do more than just satisfy the demands of those on its waiting list. The company’s exponential growth projections call for putting 6,500 e-motos on the roads of East Africa by the end of 2023, 20,000–30,000 in 2024, and 600,000 by 2030, with a comparably scaled-up network of battery swap stations to keep them all powered and cleanly running.
But Ampersand does not necessarily envisage producing all those e-motos by itself. “We’ve been designing and building vehicles and batteries ourselves for now,” Taiei explains, “just because there didn’t already exist an off-the-shelf vehicle or battery that meets the needs of this market. Our vision of the future is that we primarily want to be the energy provider — that’s actually the hardest part — so it would be great if other companies came to us and said, ‘We want to focus on building vehicles. Can we operate on your network?’ We’ve already begun conversations like this with some potential future partners.”
Ampersand’s first battery swap station was set up using solar energy to power it. But since, in Rwanda, more than half of the power on the grid comes from hydro-electric stations and is thus already clean, sustainable, reliable, and abundant — and the situation is similar throughout East Africa — it made more sense to focus on putting more bikes using better batteries on the road than separately charging each station with solar power. All subsequent stations in the network in both Kigali and Nairobi have been hooked up to the grid at less cost to both company and customer.
“And with a lot of new large hydro projects coming on line,” Taiei adds, “this is a good place to prove that this concept works. So for now, we’re just focused on starting with East Africa — though perhaps there are some things that are transferable to other areas…”
So perhaps one day, powering clean silent e-motos with a network of sustainably-charged battery swap stations will not be limited to mototaxi drivers in East Africa and commuters on scooters in Taiwan, but extend to motorcyclists all over the world.
If you would like to find out more about Taiei Harimoto and his work please visit ampersand’s website: https://www.ampersand.solar
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Ampersand’s Rwanda team with Taiei proudly standing behind on the right.
Know, care and take action are essential elements of our school’s mission and the Green Report exemplifies how Nishimachi’s faculty have woven first hand opportunities into the curriculum so students can expand their capacity in all three areas.
Each fall Nishimachi’s grade 9 students begin their Humanities class with a challenge - to produce a report on our school’s sustainability efforts to preserve the environment. The Green Report was named by the Class of 2022 and has become an annual project. Students spend weeks learning ways to study complex issues, considering how to collect, analyze and apply data to further their understanding, and work collaboratively to tackle the many elements of the final report. Students assess their skills and work as a team - allocating themselves to segments of the project where their skills can make the great-
Window into Nishimachi’s Sustainability Efforts
Andrew Deane discusses with Mary Margaret Mallat, Nishimachi’s Director of Advancement, the process grade 9 students follow to produce the Green Report, a student driven analysis of Nishimachi’s sustainability efforts.
est contribution, thus showcasing everyone’s talents in the final report.
Andrew Deane, grade 9 Humanities teacher summaries the unit in this way:
“The unit teaches planning of a multi-stage, multi-authored research document, conducting of quantitative and qualitative research (interviewing, data gathering, survey-crafting), data analysis and interpretation, report drafting, revising and editing, and publication and presentation. Research into patterns of environmental interaction over the course of the history of our school, and analysis on how our footprint has grown or receded helps us understand how social, cultural, political and economic factors shape and are shaped by our physical environment. The culminating product is the multi-authored annual Green Report, with commendations and recommendations for the school governance.”
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Grade 9 students discuss their research on the Green Report.
Grade 9 students discuss their research on the Green Report and check-in with grade 9 teacher Andrew Deane.
While the Green Report is a culminating achievement for students in grade 9, younger students at Nishimachi are also demonstrating their capacity to know, care and take action, in their elementary grades. From kindergarten to grade 9, students are building their skills to understand and explore the environment as an important issue in our world today.
Karen O’Neill, Nishimachi Head of School, recently shared her observations with parents about the depth and breadth of skills she observed among grade 5 students:
“In our grade 5 classes, students were demonstrating their problem solving skills by identifying an environmental issue, researching the issues surrounding it, taking surveys, interviewing experts, presenting data, writing a paper, and then arguing the pros and cons respectfully in a live debate. These are our 10-11 year olds, tackling complex issues by applying a multitude of skills.”
Our school’s Nishimachi Learning Expectations (NLEs) on display: We make connections! We take ownership! We pursue challenges! We act ethically! and We are creative!
Designing these types of dynamic units of study is the goal of our faculty, in partnership with the Learning Office. The school funds on-going education for teachers and uses professional development days and advanced coursework to allow teachers to bring the best practices to their classes and give our students impactful learning experiences.
For Mr. Deane, the process of developing the Green Report as a learning project came about when he pursued professional development coursework made possible by Nishimachi’s PD funds. While taking courses school leadership, he was introduced to the field of environmental ethics and realized how effective some of the frameworks he was viewing would be for students to explore real and complex problems.
“In our quest for a better, fairer, more just and equitable world, we want to develop ourselves as learners and leaders who genuinely “know,
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In the report, students identified steps the school community has already taken to achieve a more sustainable future. The latest Green Report becomes a road map for future improvements and recommendations based on other elements of the SWOT analysis including weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Programs and Initiatives Currently in Place
Nishimachi has been taking initiatives into using environmentally friendly products, and planning programs that lead to a healthier environment. These are programs and initiatives that are already in place :
●Motion-sensor lighting in hallways and stairwells in Yellow and Blue Buildings
●Water bottle fill-up stations placed around the school campus
●All lights switched to LED light bulbs
●Installed motion-sensor taps in washrooms and most student bathrooms
●Printer cartridge collection and pick-up (for Teachers, Staff, and other Faculty members)
●Collecting pet bottle caps (Grade 6 initiative)
●Cardboard and paper recycling program
●Eco friendly toilet paper, paper towel, and notebooks
care and take action to bring value to others and to make a positive impact on the world” (from our mission statement). In order to understand how values drive our actions, we will look more deeply at environmental ethics.”
As part of their Humanities unit, grade 9 students consider their own perceptions, values, and identity. They explore fundamental questions in an attempt to better understand the views they bring to the project:
“Where do our personal and societal values come from?
What do I care about, and why?
What are the various influences that shape who you are and how and why you behave the way you do? “
In preparing for the Green Report, students considered what Nishimachi had already in place to help with conservation. The list is a positive step but they also contemplated a
SWOT analysis and offered their views on our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Together with this perspective and the research they conducted through surveys and interviews, they were able to make recommendations to school leaders.
As the spring semester came to a close, they also put their advocacy into action as they identified a significant recycling opportunity to the school’s used earthquake helmets. Recognizing how decisions can be influenced by costs and opportunity, the students impressed upon the school the need to start making a difference whenever possible. What had been originally slated for disposal was negotiated by the school into a recycling opportunity that brought about a feeling for the students of truly taking action.
“Working closely with their teachers and fellow classmates, students in all grades have opportunities to touch upon the important issues of the environment and explore the impact of the choices we make locally and globally”
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