Rwamiti tells this story from a stool at the petrol station forecourt.
He always chooses the same spot—the one where old cars idle beside new ones, where petrol fumes mix with electric silence.

He does not announce himself.
People find him by accident.

That morning, a hybrid rolled in quietly, the way hybrids do, as if apologising for disturbing the air. Its driver stepped out and stood for a moment, unsure whether to smile or sigh. Rwamiti noticed this pause. He notices pauses more than words.

“People think the transition is technical,” he said later, reaching for a bottle of water. “But transitions are never technical. They are emotional.”

He had seen it before.
The first automatic cars.
The first fuel injections.
The first digital dashboards.

Every time, the story repeated itself.

At the beginning, there was excitement.
Then confusion.
Then regret.
Then blame.

And finally—silence.

Not the peaceful kind. The kind where people stop asking questions because they are tired of being sold answers.

Electric mobility arrived the same way.

From the top, it came with policies and incentives.
From the market, it came with glossy brochures and confident salespeople.
From social media, it came with arguments dressed as certainty.

But from the forecourt, it arrived differently.

It arrived as:
• a driver unsure why a warning light keeps returning
• a buyer afraid of spending savings on a technology they don’t fully understand
• an owner quietly wondering whether they made a mistake
• a mechanic explaining confidently, but changing the explanation every visit

Rwamiti listened.

He did not interrupt.
He did not correct.
He did not defend electric mobility, nor did he attack it.

He simply noticed something others missed.

No one was standing with the people already inside the transition.

Governments spoke of futures.
Companies spoke of adoption.
Mechanics spoke of fixes.

But no one was helping people make sense of what was happening to them.

One afternoon, a young man asked him, “So is electric mobility good or bad?”

Rwamiti smiled.

“That question,” he said, “comes after we have already decided too quickly.”

He gestured toward the road.

“When roads widen without wisdom,” he continued, “people move faster—but they understand less. Technology is the same. Speed creates confusion long before it creates progress.”

He watched a petrol car leave.
Then an electric one.

Two worlds sharing one forecourt.

“The problem is not that people fear new mobility,” he said quietly.
“The problem is that no one is helping them slow down enough to think.”

Rwamiti does not sell vehicles.
He does not fix cars.
He does not promise certainty.

He sits where transitions pass through, and he listens until patterns reveal themselves.

Some fears, he has learned, are exaggerated.
Some problems are very real.
Some regrets come from bad advice.
Others come from decisions made too fast.

His work is not to push people forward or pull them back.

It is to help them pause.

Because clarity, he believes, is the first form of care in any transition.

Before you buy.
Before you blame.
Before you give up.

He takes another sip of water and looks again at the road.

“When technology changes faster than judgment,” he says, “someone must be willing to stand still.”

Then he asks the question he never answers himself:

In a world rushing toward new mobility, who is helping people make sense of where they already are?

— Uncle Rwamiti

Dr Petero Wamala
Petrol Station Sage | Observing mobility transitions where technology meets human judgment