PLUG ECONOMICS : EVs start making business sense on South African roads, slowly

South Africa’s electric vehicle market is still small, expensive and short of the policy firepower seen in faster-moving countries. But the argument for EVs is no longer only about climate virtue or shiny motoring tech. Increasingly, it is about maths.

At a recent EE Business Intelligence webinar on the state of the electric vehicle industry, Hiten Parmar, executive director of The Electric Mission, Ndia Magadagela, CEO of Everlectric, and Grant Locke, managing director of Volvo Car South Africa, unpacked the road ahead for electric mobility in South Africa.

Parmar’s opening message was blunt: South Africa has moved, but too slowly.

The country produced 618,077 vehicles in 2025, but its automotive sector is still heavily tied to internal combustion engine production. However, South Africa’s vehicle manufacturing industry is export-orientated, with the EU and UK among its most important markets. Those markets are moving towards stricter emissions rules and, eventually, the phase-down of new petrol and diesel vehicle sales.

“It is important and immediate that South Africa transitions its manufacturing incentives to allocate for these emission vehicle technologies,” Parmar said.

His point was not that South Africa has no industrial base. Quite the opposite. Rather, he said local production lines had the flexibility to adapt to different powertrain technologies, depending on decisions made by vehicle manufacturers. The question is whether the country can move fast enough to protect its existing automotive base while building a new one.

On the demand side, the market is still tiny. Parmar said South Africa had 4,502 battery electric vehicle registrations by the end of 2025, and 4,835 plug-in hybrid electric vehicle registrations. His deeper estimate, using data adapted from SARS and AutoStats, put battery electric passenger vehicle stock at about 7,900 units.

That is growth, but not yet the sort of growth that changes the market’s centre of gravity. Parmar said South Africa remains far from the 5% market-share tipping point at which adoption starts to accelerate.

There are also gaps: vehicle affordability, import duties, charging infrastructure, electricity anxiety and limited model choice. Yet the speakers argued that some of these objections were beginning to lose bite, particularly for commercial fleets.

Magadagela said fleet operators had already found pockets where EVs worked, not because of green branding, but because they lowered costs.

“What we have seen for the fleet side is that commercial fleets have done the maths,” she said.

Everlectri