I am writing this on a flight from Cape Town to Joburg after one of the most epic adventures of my life: driving in a convoy of five electric vehicles (EVs) across South Africa, via some of the country’s remotest places, while relying on a fledgling network of EV charging stations.
In North America, Europe or China this would have been relatively easy. But in South Africa, where there is still a dearth of high-capacity DC charging points for EVs, it would be much more challenging. We were not sure it could even be done.
A team of 13 people — including representatives of the Automotive Business Council (Naamsa), Accenture, KPMG, FNB and WesBank, Woolworths, the Industrial Development Corp, the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth Development Office and the Electric Mission (a global alliance of EV associations) — met at 3.30am one day last week for a final top-up of power at a fast-charging station in Joburg before setting off.
The 2,250km trip would take in the picturesque hamlet of Nieu-Bethesda, a Bafana Bafana football match at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Gqeberha, a drive over the Swartberg Pass and a night in Prince Albert. Neither Nieu-Bethesda nor Prince Albert has a charging station.
The vehicles were entirely battery powered and there was no backup vehicle. Spoiler alert: all five — a BMW iX50, Volvo XC40, Mercedes-Benz EQE 350+, Volkswagen ID.4 and BYD Seal (a new EV from the Chinese car giant) — made it to the destination, Signal Hill in Cape Town.
The event came ahead of South African Auto Week, Naamsa’s annual motoring industry showcase, and was filmed for a documentary — look out for it in the next few weeks. It is impossible to summarise everything here, but two challenges were notable.
After a relatively incident-free start, we ran into big trouble in Colesberg, where all of the town’s three fast-chargers were misbehaving. It was one place where none of us thought we’d have a problem with charging, but there we were, in 35ºC heat, waiting hours for a fix.
A decision by the team in the BYD Seal to recharge their vehicle at a station in Jansenville, between Graaff-Reinet and Gqeberha, backfired spectacularly
With support from the team at GridCars — a pioneer in EV charging stations in South Africa — we were eventually back on the road, though the first night’s stopover, in Nieu-Bethesda, saw some EVs, including the Volvo in which I rode, arriving late in the evening — not ideal given the predawn departure the next morning.
A decision by the team in the BYD Seal to recharge their vehicle at a station in Jansenville, between Graaff-Reinet and Gqeberha, backfired spectacularly — the car’s modern 800V architecture was incompatible with the town’s older 500V charging station, which GridCars installed in 2018 (a lifetime in EV terms). The charger would not supply power to the Seal. BYD and GridCars have work to do (and have acknowledged as much).
So, we plugged the BYD into another charger at the farm stall next to the charging station to try to get sufficient juice for the BYD team to limp back 80km to a proper charger in Graaff-Reinet.
But eventually the call had to be made: arrange a flatbed to transport the vehicle to Gqeberha, to a super-modern 150kW charging station at the city’s football stadium built by Rubicon for AIDC Eastern Cape, a provincial government agency. AIDC-EC is deploying 13 of these chargers across the province, which will go a long way in resolving the issues we encountered.
It was the only time any of the cars got into trouble, with all five sailing through days 3 and 4 on the less-travelled roads of the Western Cape, including the spectacular Swartberg pass.
The expedition proved you can drive an EV across South Africa, albeit with possible hiccups, but that doing so requires meticulous planning. “Always be charging” became a mantra of the trip — the country needs to move with urgency to expand the charging infrastructure. Cheaper electric cars are coming, with prices expected to plunge below R400,000 soon, and that could lead to a lift-off in demand.
Of course, our trip would have been very different if we’d attempted it during stage 6 load-shedding. Let’s hope we never return to those dark days.
As this road trip demonstrated, travel to remote parts in an EV is possible. Still, much work lies ahead to make it a seamless and hassle-free experience. We’ll get there.
*McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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