Here’s how well electric cars are doing in South Africa

Updated: BMW Group South Africa has clarified that it does not have a relationship with GridCars but with a different contractor who installs ChargeNow stations on its behalf. 

As part of a recent parliamentary Q&A session the minister of transport, Blade Nzimande, released new statistics detailing the number of electric cars in South Africa.

According to the minister, there are a total of 867 electric vehicles currently registered in the country.

Gauteng makes up nearly half of this total with 390 of the registered vehicles, while 252 electric vehicles are registered in the Western Cape.

There are fewer than 100 hundred vehicles in each of the country’s seven remaining provinces – likely as a result of the concentration of infrastructure needed for this type of transportation.

However, Nzimande indicated that adoption is set to increase as public charging stations become more widely available.

“According to GridCars, the largest installer of public charging stations in South Africa, they will have 200 EV charging stations installed in the country by the end of March 2019 in collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover South Africa, BMW South Africa and Shell South Africa,” Nzimande said.

“These charging stations will be located along major National Routes and at various points of convenience, such as shopping centres, in the country’s major hubs, including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Bloemfontein.”

According to January 2018 data from analytics company Lightstone, around 375 electric vehicles had been sold in South Africa since the inception of electrically powered vehicles (EV) in the country.

This means that the number of electric cars in the country has effectively doubled over the last year.

Read: Jaguar has launched an electric car charging network in South Africa – here’s how it works