64 free electric car charging stations in South Africa

The number of public charging stations in South Africa where electric vehicles (EVs) can top up their batteries for free has grown substantially in the past few months.

EV owners in South Africa will generally find that the most convenient and affordable location to charge their car will be at home.

While home charging is slower, owners can be plugged in here for extended periods — like when parked in the driveway or garage overnight.

There is no difference in the cost of electricity used for refilling the battery or powering other appliances.

An EV will likely be one of a household’s biggest electricity consumers, but its additional costs will be much lower than what a driver would have spent on fuel to cover the same distance in a petrol or diesel car.

Even with substantial electricity price hikes in recent years, EVs in South Africa have about a third to half the running cost of petrol models when only charging through grid power.

South African EV owners will likely be less reliant on public charging stations in cities and towns than other countries where multi-person dwellings like large apartment buildings are more common.

These residential configurations can have limited parking availability and have more challenging EV charging construction.

In South Africa, public chargers emphasise speed over price, which means they should generally only be used in emergencies or when covering long distance.

The fastest charging points use direct current (DC) to top up batteries in as little time as possible.

South Africa’s largest charging station operator GridCars mostly offers 60kW stations. However, GridCars and its competitors also boast stations with capacities exceeding 100kW.

Charging at these stations will cost either R7.00 or R7.35 per kWh. Using their slower alternating current (AC) charging points costs R5.88 per kWh.

These fees are substantially higher than the roughly R3.00 to R4.00 per kWh that residential users pay.

However, there are many cases where property owners offer free AC charging.

Free chargers are most commonly found at vehicle dealerships, shopping malls or centres, and overnight accommodation establishments, and certain universities.

They can encourage users to spend time and money while using other services near the charger or act as a value-add to improve the overall visitor experience.

The most common maximum speed at stations with free charging is 22kW AC, which means a charge from empty to full will typically only be achievable in more than two hours.

However, they can still add a substantial amount of range in a fairly short time.

South Africa’s best-selling electric car — the Volvo EX30 — has a 51kWh pack in its entry-level model.

As its onboard charger supports 22kW charging, it will be able to increase its battery level by more than 40% in an hour. That should work out to more than 140km of range.

Tracking down free stations

MyBroadband compiled a comprehensive list of all the free charging station sites in South Africa using various popular EV location maps.

Finding free charging stations can be tricky, as there is currently no all-inclusive, up-to-date EV charging map platform in South Africa.

GridCars offers a “free charging” filter on its online EV map, which includes over 300 stations. At the time of publication, it listed 45 stations with free charging.

Most of these were located at BMW dealers. It must be emphasised that these are open to users of EVs other than from BMW. Users only need a GridCars account to activate the chargers.

However, the GridCars map excludes a handful of chargers that don’t form part of its own or partnering networks.

Crowdsourcing platform PlugShare includes many of these stations, but MyBroadband found that its free charging filter was hit-and-miss.

It would regularly show a station as having free charging when it required payment.

Where a charging station on PlugShare was also available on the GridCars network, we used the latter’s data on charging costs to ensure these chargers were truly free to use.

Overall, we established there were at least 64 free electric charging stations in the country, an increase of 36% over the 47 we counted in September 2024.

The locations of these stations are shown in the table below.