ELECTRIC MOBILITY
The private buyer ' s equation
An electric vehicle makes the most sense for an ordinary motorist when their daily driving is predictable and they can charge at home or at work, since most everyday trips sit comfortably within what a current EV can manage. That rules out a lot of people, though. Apartment residents, tenants, anyone without secure parking simply has nowhere to plug in, and charging in public is nowhere near as easy as charging overnight at home.
Price is still the bigger obstacle. Hybrids let buyers cut their fuel bill without staking everything on charging infrastructure, which is probably why they still dominate new energy vehicle sales, while battery-electric cars mostly sell at the top end of the market. The passenger market will stay lopsided for a while yet, growing first among wealthier households, company and rental fleets, and drivers who already have solar or home charging in place.
Commercial vehicles are a different story altogether.
Where the kilometres add up " In the commercial space, vehicles that are highly utilised and move on somewhat predictable routes make the most economic sense," Vieira Naudé says, " both for driving down and making operating costs more predictable, given diesel price volatility, and for decarbonising supply chains to meet ESG and global market requirements." A delivery vehicle that comes back to the same depot every evening doesn ' t need a nationwide charging network. It just needs enough range for its route and a reliable charger waiting for it at base, which is why electric motorcycles and threewheelers are catching on in food and grocery delivery, and why buses, airport shuttles and municipal fleets suit the same pattern.
GreenCape expects electric light delivery vehicles to make up around 3 % of the market by 2030, since there ' s plenty of demand for them and their routes are short enough that planning charging around them isn ' t much of a headache. As for when the sums actually start favouring an EV, there ' s no single mileage where that happens: " the higher the fuel consumption and the higher the mileage, the more attractive the TCO should become toward EVs," Vieira Naudé says, " but route planning and charging strategies should always be considered too." For companies with sustainability targets to hit, the decision gets easier still: " if you need to decarbonise your supply chain to meet global requirements or are serious about Net Zero goals, then the choice becomes easier."
Woolworths is a good example of that logic playing out. The retailer runs 42 electric delivery vehicles for online orders across Cape Town and Gauteng, the same core fleet it ' s had since launching three years ago, and it ' s covered more than 4 million kilometres in that time, saving around 280 000kg of CO 2 a year, or 840 000kg in total so far, according to a Woolworths spokesperson. " The vehicles have performed flawlessly during their operations with us," the spokesperson says. " Only the tyres have needed replacing, and every once in a while the window-washer tank needs to be filled with water." The fleet runs a full day on a single overnight charge with no top-ups in between, because Woolworths has deliberately steered clear of charging mid-shift: " there is a very specific match required between the total distance serviced on the delivery route and the number of stops expected along the route, that determines the suitability for an EV to be deployed."
That matching exercise matters more than the fleet ' s unchanged size might suggest. Woolworths says nothing structural is stopping it from growing, " other than our desire to expand on preferred routes that meet our criteria," which is really the whole argument in one line. Doing well on one set of routes doesn ' t automatically mean a vehicle will suit the next set, and someone has to run that match again for every new route rather than assuming success just repeats itself. Everlectric, the company that actually runs the Woolworths fleet day to day alongside similar fleets for Clicks / UPD and Takealot, put the size of its whole operation at more than 6.5 million kilometres across its platform as of early 2025, adding another 10 000km to 20 000km most days, a reminder that Woolworths is just one visible piece of something now running across several big retailers at once.
The trend is spreading past vans faster than GreenCape expected, too. Clicks secured 30 heavy-duty electric trucks, built by Sany, in September, and its Montague
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