Adam Workman, Author at Smarter Mobility Africa

3 June 2019

Everything you need to know about EVs in South Africa

Drivers are increasingly going electric in SA – if you want to join them, here is a guide to the essential information

The electric-vehicle revolution is gathering momentum in South Africa, with modest beginnings starting to blossom into a full-on movement – something that will be catalysed even further by EVRT Africa in October.

According to figures revealed by South Africa’s Minister of Transport, Dr Blade Nzimande, the country had 867 EVs registered as of March this year. And that number is set to increase significantly with a number of manufacturers either entering or planning to enter the market.

Indeed, earlier this year, Jaguar Land Rover South Africa predicted that 43,000 new EVs could be sold in the country in the next six years, which would represent a phenomenal growth – time to get in on the ground floor.

Why should you make the switch ?

The most tangible metric is the carbon footprint of EVs versus that of petrol cars. On average, an EV is calculated to have approximately half the carbon footprint of an equivalent petrol-powered vehicle. And although South Africa’s energy grid is more reliant on fossil fuels than in many other countries, a move towards solar-powered charging stations will help to combat this disparity.

The cost of charging your EV will vary depending on the manufacturer and model. To give a ballpark example, however, according to CAR magazine, one of the most respected automotive media names in the country, in a recent road test, a full 95kWh recharge for an Audi e-tron 55 Quattro SUV at home would cost between R300 and R350.

Which brings us to the next vital question…

Which EV models are currently available in South Africa?

Choices when sizing up which EV to shell out your hard-earned cash on are, admittedly, rather limited right now. But the options are expanding all the time and this year will see several new models go on sale.

The latest contender to throw its metaphorical hat in the ring is the Jaguar I-Pace, the much-celebrated all-electric SUV, which has won numerous prestigious awards across the world since it first saw the light of day last year. Jaguar currently lists its starting price as from R1,687,200.

The BMW i3 is the market veteran, by comparison, with the charming little hatchback retailing from R658,500.

The Nissan Leaf, meanwhile, which was previously on sale in SA, is currently unavailable until the arrival of the new Leaf model, representatives from the Japanese carmaker told us. A date for that arrival is TBC.

So what else is next? The aforementioned Audi e-tron is mooted for the final quarter of 2019, according to CAR, while compatriot carmaker Mercedes-Benz is also preparing its competitor, the EQC, for later in the year.

Away from the household names, NeuWai, a brand of South Korea’s Songuo Motors, has plans to sell a new generation of affordable electric vehicles in South Africa from as early as 2020. Business Insider South Africa recently reported that the brand promised “fun-to-drive vehicles” that “make people happy”, which sounds rather heartwarming.

And what of the most-discussed EV brand on the planet? Well, South Africa’s electric-endorsing expat son, Elon Musk, tweeted in December that he hoped to have Teslas on the roads in his homeland by “probably end of” 2019. Keep your fingers crossed, then, for the Model S, Model X, Model 3 and, farther in the future, the Model Y and the new Roadster.

As it stands, the strict guidelines for personal imports of cars into South Africa don’t include any specific provisions for EVs. So for now, the best route for owning an EV in the country is buying one of the models mentioned above through the official dealerships (and reputable second-hand channels).

How does it work and where can you charge ?

Charging your EV couldn’t be easier – on the go, it’s simply a case of locating a charging station on South Africa’s growing network (either a regular station or a high-power fast charger), plugging in your vehicle and juicing it up the required amount.

The best way to find your nearest charging stations and plan routes using an EV is to consult PlugShare’s nifty website and app (for iOS and Android) – visit www.plugshare.com. PlugShare details information on charging plug types, network providers, locations where you will need to pay for charging and facilities at the charging stations, so you can recharge yourself as well as your four-wheeled friend.

Replenishing from the comfort of your own abode is even simpler – just about every EV manufacturer provided cables and connectors for home charging while you eat, sleep or Netflix to your heart’s content.

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9 May 2019

Electric dreams: my memories of taking part in the EVRT Middle East

Adam Workman News, Post 18

Ever since first getting my hands on a Tesla three years ago – a white-knuckle road test through the foothills of the Austrian Alps outside Vienna in a Model S P90D Ludicrous edition – I’ve been an unashamed electric car convert. As I write this, I’m awaiting a pre-ordered Model 3.

Living in Abu Dhabi, the timing was good: the first iteration of the EVRT Middle East landed in the UAE less than six months after my Model S experience, and although I missed that debut event thanks to a pre-arranged trip overseas, when the second helping hit the region in January 2018, I made sure to book myself in.

That first personal taste of the EVRT was, sadly, all too short, with work commitments meaning I was only able to jump on the opening stint from the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi south to the Tilal Liwa Hotel, a desert resort on the fringes of Madinat Zayed.

My ride wasn’t quite as speedy as that Ludicrous-level Tesla, but the 2019 Chevrolet Bolt EV demonstrated that there is plentiful life at the opposite end of the electric-car scale, being treated to a preview of the car before anybody else in the Middle East. Accompanied by a revolving cast of fellow motoring journalists, under the watchful, knowledgeable eye of GM comms and product don Ronald Balit, we eked out the little Bolt’s relatively modest range – and my abiding memory is of the whole car gleefully taking photos of a road sign for Million Street. Said amount of UAE dirhams would buy you more than five Bolt EVs in the Emirates.

As the distance went up, the camaraderie did so incrementally a year later on the EVRT Middle East 2019 – this time around, I was able to commit to the 500 kilometres or so that opened the event between Abu Dhabi and Muscat. That longer leg meant that charging stops would become an important focal point.

The first drive saw me grouped with an eclectic team that spanned enthusiasts to industry and showed off the community-crossing potential of the road trips. American EV devotee Charlotte Omoto was first in the driver’s seat, entertaining and informing the other three occupants: myself, green lifer Ben Hill (former vice president of Tesla Europe, Africa & Middle East) and journalist Kyle Hill (of trailblazing US website CleanTechnica). One breakfast break and a team shuffle later, Charlotte and I were joined by the amiable motoring vlogger known to his 150,000-plus YouTube subscribers as Mr Mawater. The teamwork – and an impromptu pub-grub pit stop – that followed in our attempts to keep our Model S charged all the way to Oman’s capital were in fact so successful that we were the first road trippers to reach the day’s destination.

The beating-the-system feeling of locating a squirrelled-away destination charger in Al Ain for a top-up, just before crossing the border into Oman, was only matched by the team bonding that resulted in Omani city Sohar – it was there that we decamped to the aforementioned pub for satisfyingly greasy food and some rounds of pool while the Tesla’s battery refilled outside. You don’t get that kind of socialising at your local petrol station.

Quite aside from clambering into new EV models in a real-world setting before the general public and, for anybody who hasn’t previously been an owner, first-hand experience of the charging lifestyle, what really stood out on my two EVRT events so far is the people I met. Indeed, the friendships forged meant I’ve kept in touch with several of them. The spectrum of nationalities, ages and professions cannot fail to take you enjoyably out of your own social bubble.

Another continent is about to be conquered. EVRT Africa is set to add multiple new dimensions to the whole road-trip format, with rolling South African landscapes – and probably a few wildlife sights – providing the canvas. It feels like something of a new frontier in electric cars’ seemingly unstoppable spread across the planet. And that pioneering spirit seems entirely in keeping with the EVRT ethos.

1 May 2019

How electric cars can help South Africa’s electricity grid

Adam Workman News, Post electric vehicle, news 18

Rather than placing extra strain on power supplies and causing load shedding, EVs have an important role to play in the future of electricity

Load shedding has become a hot topic in South Africa. For anybody who is unaware, in a nutshell, load shedding is a last-resort measure used to ease over-demand on the electricity grid via scheduled temporary localised power cuts.

With electric vehicles beginning to make real inroads around the country and this October’s first ever EVRT Africa set to raise the profile of EVs even further, many South Africans have voiced concerns that load shedding could be worsened by the power demands of charging them.

Ben Pullen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Generation.e, first experienced load shedding in South Africa in October 2018. He says that concerns that EVs could exacerbate problems are wide of the mark – and that the grid could actually be aided.

“Currently there’s been no load shedding at nighttime – it’s been more of a daytime issue,” he explains. “So you’ll charge your vehicle at nighttime and you’ll be fully charged for the day ahead – it’s very rare you would use all of your battery [in a day] unless you were doing a long-distance road trip, which is rare for the majority of the population.

“What you’re doing actually is helping the grid. The current grids don’t act in a way where they can flick the energy on and off when they like, so [at off-peak times, such as during the night] you have electricity being generated and maybe being wasted. If cars can start taking some of that load at nighttime, it could be good for the grid, because they’ll sell those kilowatt hours instead of generating and wasting them.”

The next stage, indeed, is that electric vehicles are set to be able to feed power back into the grid, as well as via related tech such as Tesla’s Powerwall home battery.

“Nissan is one of the leaders of that technology right now,” Pullen says. “They’re already doing pilots around the world where they’re applying vehicle-to-grid technology, which means it becomes part of the grid – when the car needs energy, it can charge, but if the grid needs energy, it can feed some energy back. While we have a small amount of cars, it’s hard to imagine the impact, but even if we had 1,000 cars in an area, if all of them had batteries at 60kW, that’s 60,000kW of battery power. The car could become a battery storage unit, which the grid desperately needs – across the world, storage is the big challenge with electricity.

“Tesla Powerwall would charge itself from the grid and then you would use it for your home when it needs it, either when the grid’s down or, most likely, because you’re trying to benefit from buying electricity when it’s cheap and then using it when it would be expensive.”

As the owner of a BMW i3, Johannesburg-based Maletlabo Handel has enjoyed plenty of first-hand experience of running an electric car in South Africa. The EVRT Africa Project Coordinator is positive about the future – and the present.

“Load shedding is still a challenge in SA,” she admits, “but this has never affected my daily commute with my electric car. I just need to plug in my car during off-peak periods and in the morning I’m good to go with a guaranteed fully charged battery.

“The infrastructure is slowly being put into place strategically in SA, and with solar-powered charge points, soon worrying about charging your car during load shedding would be a thing of the past.”

It has been theorised in the past that too many EVs being charged in a small area could cause blackouts, but that is, Pullen says, “a lot of scaremongering. Technically, it could be an issue if you had hundreds and hundreds or thousands of cars all plugging in at the same time expecting the grid to give them power, but it’s not a risk that we need to be worried about in terms of it making the grid collapse. The best chargers all have demand-management capabilities. So, for example, if you had 10 charging stations, they can be controlled so they would never be charging, say, 22kW at once, because 220kW is quite a big load.”

Much like the way we are investing in our planet’s future by switching from petrol to electric vehicles, taking a forward-facing approach to power supplies is vital to South Africa’s future, Pullen stresses.

“If something isn’t working as well as it should be, it doesn’t mean you stop trying to improve anything,” he says. “So, yes, there is obviously an issue with the grid to provide consistent and sustainable power, but if we start ruling out new technologies, the grid’s going to be so outdated.

“It’s really important to embrace electric vehicles, battery storage, renewable energy and smart meters now – anything that helps the grid be smarter. There’s so much more that you can do with the grid. The more that someone like Eskom is embracing these technologies, it can only be a good thing, because it means they’re looking ahead to the future. South Africa cannot be left behind.”

Adam Workman

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