Taliban Unveils First ‘Indigenously Built’ Car

Taliban fighters stand guard in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Dec. 26, 2022. Recent Taliban
AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi
John Hayward

The Taliban cannot keep the people of Afghanistan fed and clothed without massive international humanitarian aid, which they might not be getting for much longer if they keep oppressing women, but somehow the junta found time and resources to design and build a prototype “supercar” called the Mada 9.

Auto website TimesDrive reported Thursday on the big Mada 9 rollout at the headquarters of the ENTOP auto design studio in Kabul:

While unveiling the car yesterday at the ENTOP headquarters, Taliban’s Higher Education Minister, Abdul Baqi Haqqani stated how the car was going to prove the Taliban regime’s commitment to providing ‘religion and modern sciences for its people.’

Adding on to that, ENTOP’s (the car manufacturer) CEO, Mohammad Riza Ahmadi told TOLO news that the supercar will “convey the value of knowledge to the people” which in turn will help boost the image of Afghanistan on the world stage.

TimesDrive quoted press statements from ENTOP and its partners that the car uses a “modified Toyota Corolla engine” that has somehow been modified to produce race-car performance. The company also plans to make an electric version available.

Taliban public relations officials insist the Mada 9 has been fully tested, although they have produced no evidence of such tests or anything else beyond a few photos and videos of the parked supercar. One video clip reportedly shows the car slowly gliding down a snow-dusted road.

On Monday, ENTOP released a dramatic action-movie-style teaser video for the car, which still featured the vehicle doing nothing, and cut to black before showing whether the door could even be opened:

ENTOP CEO Muhammad Raza Ahmadi said the car was developed over the past five years with an eye toward the rough and hilly terrain of Afghanistan. Ahmadi claimed the prototype would soon be presented to the public at a car show in Qatar.

Taliban Higher Education Minister Abdul Baqi Haqqi gave a triumphant speech at the unveiling, crediting Afghanistan’s fantastic education system, which completely excludes women, for making the miracle of a high-performance race car with a Toyota Corolla engine possible.

The UK Daily Mail noted that not every international observer was thrilled by the rollout:

The news of the supercar was met with much praise in Afghanistan and social media users eagerly shared images of the vehicle claiming it as proof of the nation’s scientific and technological capabilities. But many more users pointed out that the supercar was unveiled as Afghanistan battles one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, while the country’s women have seen their rights to study and work wiped away by the Taliban.

The Taliban had ‘promised through their representatives that there will be no ban on female education or on female workers’, said Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the independent Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

‘Clearly, we have been misled by the Taliban government. Clearly, they are making it impossible for us to work now,’ he said on Monday.

Egeland added he has heard some encouraging news of a “fierce debate in the Taliban” over banning women from schools, in part because some senior Taliban officials sent their own daughters to schools run by international organizations before the coup.

“There is an internal battle and the wrong group seems to have the upper hand now,” he said.

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