When you can buy an electric VW in South Africa

[Hanno Labuschagne]

When you can buy an electric VW in South Africa

Volkswagen has announced that its e-Golf pilot project has launched in South Africa, outlining the release timeline for its electric vehicles in South Africa.

The e-Golf project will see six fully-electric vehicles being tested by motoring and lifestyle media, selected dealers, and Volkswagen employees to gain insight into the experience of driving an electric vehicle in South Africa.

The company said that through the involvement of selected Volkswagen dealers in Gauteng and Western Cape, the project seeks to drive customer awareness and education around electric vehicles.

 

[WAslayer]

Snip/

The third and last phase will see the first fully-electric Volkswagen vehicles available for sale to customers in South Africa from 2022, the company said.

/Snip

 

[SauRoNZA]

Didn't we already have this article this morning?

 

[We Love Bass]

Didn't we already have this article this morning?

go back to sleep

 

[SauRoNZA]

go back to sleep

Nah it literally was there already.

Volkswagen electric cars to be sold in South Africa from 2022

Volkswagen electric cars to be sold in South Africa from 2022

Volkswagen electric cars to be sold in South Africa from 2022 Volkswagen says it has taken the first step towards electric mobility in South Africa through the launch of an e-Golf pilot project.

r.tapatalk.com

But it was Business Tech I see now. Still with a more relevant headline.

 

[Deandbn]

The last place they should be introducing electric vehicles is SA..
Goodness, the government can't even keep the lights on from day to day let alone charging cars. The price of electricity is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these electric vehicles will be very expensive to run. Replacing the battery every 2 years at around half the original cost of the car is sure to be really expensive too.
They also omit to mention that if you want fast charging at home in your garage, you would have to install 3 phase power and pay commercial rates for it.
A very expensive and fruitless endeavour.. Stick to petrol, it just works and is very cheap comparatively.
The disposal of large batteries is also environmentally terrible.

Need I continue?

 

[Jet-Fighter7700]

also dont forget electric cars dont pay petrol taxes,
so how will that work?

I foresee it as the card you swipe being required to be loaded with money,
and then it will charge

then all the mechanics and petrol station attendants what will happen to them?

 

[Matt91]

The last place they should be introducing electric vehicles is SA..
Goodness, the government can't even keep the lights on from day to day let alone charging cars. The price of electricity is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these electric vehicles will be very expensive to run. Replacing the battery every 2 years at around half the original cost of the car is sure to be really expensive too.
They also omit to mention that if you want fast charging at home in your garage, you would have to install 3 phase power and pay commercial rates for it.
A very expensive and fruitless endeavour.. Stick to petrol, it just works and is very cheap comparatively.
The disposal of large batteries is also environmentally terrible.

Need I continue?

I was wondering about this the other day when I saw someone advertising an older '08 model Prius. Is it really that expensive to replace the battery bank in EVs? Is it always the case that the batteries will need replacing regardless of how the vehicle was driven, say for instance like an old lady just pottering around to the shops and back.

was also considering getting a 2015 CR-Z but just not knowing all that much about Hybrids or EV's I wouldn't want to get into something that could end up being a costly mistake.

 

[Deandbn]

I was wondering about this the other day when I saw someone advertising an older '08 model Prius. Is it really that expensive to replace the battery bank in EVs? Is it always the case that the batteries will need replacing regardless of how the vehicle was driven, say for instance like an old lady just pottering around to the shops and back.

was also considering getting a 2015 CR-Z but just not knowing all that much about Hybrids or EV's I wouldn't want to get into something that could end up being a costly mistake.

Hybrid cars don't need external electricity, and in fact don't even need the battery at all because they run on petrol.
If your crz battery went flat there would just be some possible loss of power.

 

[wingnut771]

Hybrid cars don't need external electricity, and in fact don't even need the battery at all because they run on petrol.
If your crz battery went flat there would just be some possible loss of power.

with an astronomical fuel bill lugging around that heavy paper weight of a battery.

 

[Y'all Qaeda]

The last place they should be introducing electric vehicles is SA..
Goodness, the government can't even keep the lights on from day to day let alone charging cars. The price of electricity is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these electric vehicles will be very expensive to run. Replacing the battery every 2 years at around half the original cost of the car is sure to be really expensive too.
They also omit to mention that if you want fast charging at home in your garage, you would have to install 3 phase power and pay commercial rates for it.
A very expensive and fruitless endeavour.. Stick to petrol, it just works and is very cheap comparatively.
The disposal of large batteries is also environmentally terrible.

Need I continue?

Where are you getting this from? AFAIK there is still original Priuses running around on their original batteries. So that's quite the bold statement.

 

[Zophos]

I agree with your post, mainly because of this point.

To compare the climate-changing emissions from electric vehicles to gasoline-powered cars, we analyzed all of the emissions from fueling and driving both types of vehicles. For a gasoline car, that means looking at emissions from extracting crude oil from the ground, getting the oil to a refinery and making gasoline, and transporting gasoline to filling stations, in addition to combustion emissions from the tailpipe.

For electric vehicles, the calculation includes both power plant emissions and emissions from the production of coal, natural gas and other fuels power plants use.

As SA is still using outdated Coal Fired Power plants, this will definitely tip the scales into the petrol engine's favor

However, you lost me at this point.

The disposal of large batteries is also environmentally terrible.

In the available literature it is generally suggested that EV batteries provide useful life in vehicles until they degrade to around 80% of their original capacity. A growing trend is to then re-use these batteries for PV storage solutions.

By using figures from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Neubauer et. al., 2015), the study also assumes that batteries used for second-life applications will have a further 10 years added to their lifetime before fully reaching their end-of-life.

Just something to bear in mind...

 

[Y'all Qaeda]

The last place they should be introducing petrol vehicles is SA..
Goodness, the government can't even keep the all the horsecrap out of the streets, now we should trust them to build fuel stations everywhere. The price of petrol is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these internal combustion vehicles will be very expensive to run. Servicing the engine every 10000km at around half the original cost of the car is sure to be really expensive too.
They also omit to mention that if you want higher octane fuel on the highveld it's more expensive and you have to pay commercial rates for it.
A very expensive and fruitless endeavour.. Stick to horses, it just works and is very cheap comparatively.
The consumption of fuel is also environmentally terrible.

Need I continue?

Actually, decided to change your post up a little. It's just change, give tech a chance to catchup and you'll be saying the same things of the next technology.

Need I continue?

 

[newby_investor]

Eskom and load-shedding isn't really an issue for electric vehicles. Two to four hours per day without power doesn't leave you all of a sudden without your phone or your laptop, so your car shouldn't be an issue either. You can charge it when there is power. It could actually help eskom by giving them more revenue, since they're complaining about reduced sales lately, and most car charging is definitely going to happen when it's off-peak, i.e. overnight.

EV batteries should have lifespans of 10 years plus. The batteries in cars such as the bmw i3 are deliberately over-provisioned for greater lifespan, unlike cellphones and laptops. When your car says it's at 100% capacity, it's actually only about 80% of what the batteries can theoretically store. Similarly, when it says 0%, they're still at about 30% charge. Even when the battery does deteriorate, it's got to go past 20% of its capacity (i.e. below 80% total) before you'd even notice it. So by using roughly half of the battery instead of the whole range, you'll get 10 years worth of life out of the battery instead of 2.

Fast charging is an issue - it could take more than a night to charge a "fully" depleted battery on a large-capacity car with a normal 16-amp breaker. But I doubt you'd need to go full 3-phase unless you really want a 30-minute charge or something.

 

[wingnut771]

Eskom and load-shedding isn't really an issue for electric vehicles. Two to four hours per day without power doesn't leave you all of a sudden without your phone or your laptop, so your car shouldn't be an issue either. You can charge it when there is power. It could actually help eskom by giving them more revenue, since they're complaining about reduced sales lately, and most car charging is definitely going to happen when it's off-peak, i.e. overnight.

EV batteries should have lifespans of 10 years plus. The batteries in cars such as the bmw i3 are deliberately over-provisioned for greater lifespan, unlike cellphones and laptops. When your car says it's at 100% capacity, it's actually only about 80% of what the batteries can theoretically store. Similarly, when it says 0%, they're still at about 30% charge. Even when the battery does deteriorate, it's got to go past 20% of its capacity (i.e. below 80% total) before you'd even notice it. So by using roughly half of the battery instead of the whole range, you'll get 10 years worth of life out of the battery instead of 2.

Fast charging is an issue - it could take more than a night to charge a "fully" depleted battery on a large-capacity car with a normal 16-amp breaker. But I doubt you'd need to go full 3-phase unless you really want a 30-minute charge or something.

fast charging also shortens the life of the battery.

 

[newby_investor]

fast charging also shortens the life of the battery.

This is true, but this depends on the characteristics of the individual cells.

EV batteries have lots of cells in parallel, so they can tolerate fairly large charging currents. In principle, it should be possible to charge a car in a similar amount of time to what it takes to charge your cellphone, if you can provide enough wattage.

 

[Archer]

Goodness, the government can't even keep the lights on from day to day let alone charging cars. The price of electricity is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these electric vehicles will be very expensive to run.

A place like SA is probably one of the best places to go EV like crazy. If everyone has an EV that they charge each night and then plug in again at work, you've got more than enough capacity to eliminate load shedding up to stage 10 (when it is eventually created ). And for that you only need each vehicle to give up 1kwh per hour of loadshedding.
But (and this is a big one), the infrastructure must be there to take advantage of it, on the grid side as well as within the vehicles. But you could localise it quite nicely (so cars becomes home and/or office battery backup, supplemented by solar or whatever)

 

[KingRat1]

A golf cart. Cool

 

[SauRoNZA]

The price of electricity is sure to increase dramatically in the short term so these electric vehicles will be very expensive to run.

Even if it doubles it's still cheaper than petrol.

Besides, the government can't be relied on to keep the petrol price in check either.

Replacing the battery every 2 years at around half the original cost of the car is sure to be really expensive too.

Nonsense.

The batteries all have warranties of 7+ years, so this conjecture is completely incorrect.

They also omit to mention that if you want fast charging at home in your garage, you would have to install 3 phase power and pay commercial rates for it.

You don't need fast charging at home, only when out and about. It can slow charge all night long.

A very expensive and fruitless endeavour.. Stick to petrol, it just works and is very cheap comparatively.
The disposal of large batteries is also environmentally terrible.

You have the option to generate your own power and fill up your car yourself...this isn't an option at all for petrol.

Petrol also isn't cheaper comparatively, not even in SA. The cars are however more expensive (at present) which brings the total cost of ownership reasonably in line over a few years if you aren't generating your own power or even if you add the costs of implementing your own power generation.

A Nissan Leaf gets around 6km per kilowatt which even at an inflated R3 a kw is 50c per km. Comparatively a similar small engined reasonably economical car that averages 6.7l/100 does just about double at R1 a km with an average fuel price of R15 a litre.

However that power generation won't just benefit your car and will save your money elsewhere again so it can offset all of it, IF you have the base resources to do that.

The disposal if done right would have them recycled and re-used for the most part.

 

[FiestaST]

Volkswagen’s Electric Strategy Kicks off in SA

Volkswagen has launched the e-Golf pilot project in South Africa, which is the brand’s first step in its commitment towards electric mobility South Africa.

After Rwanda, South Africa is now the second country in Africa where Volkswagen electric vehicles are being introduced. VWSA welcomes a total of 6 fully electric e-Golfs to the country that will be tested by local media, selected dealerships and employees in an effort to gain insight into what it’s like to use and live with an electric car in South Africa.

In fact, Cars.co.za, will be testing the e-Golf extensively at our Head Office in Johannesburg, so look out for updates coming soon!

The e-Golf offers 100 kW and 290 Nm form its electric drivetrain which includes a 35.8 kWh battery. The e-Golf’s electric range is pegged at 190 km.

VW's Electric Strategy Kicks off in SA

Volkswagen has launched the e-Golf pilot project in South Africa, which is the brand’s first step in its commitment towards electric mobility South Africa. After Rwanda, South Africa is now the second country in Africa where Volkswagen electric vehicles are being introduced. VWSA welcomes a...

www.cars.co.za