I generally wouldn’t cover electric car sales in a market where there are so few as in South Africa, but I found the absurdly low numbers somewhat “humorous,” the #1 electric car on the market is also quite funny, and I know we have some South African readers, so… here we are.
Basically, the story is that only three electric cars seem to be on the market in South Africa — the BMW i3, BMW i8, and Nissan LEAF. This just backs up the argument that BMW and Nissan are the most serious conventional automakers regarding the electric car market.
Interestingly, in this tiny market, the extremely expensive BMW i8 is actually the best-selling electric car. 😛 Granted, it just has one more sale than the BMW i3, but nonetheless…
Jose Pontes, who collected the numbers, does note that 2015 sales are already more than electric car sales in all of 2014 (160 vs 140), so that’s something. As a percentage of the new car market, they are up to 0.04% (yikes) from 0.02% (super yikes).
Here are the charts and table:
I am visiting SA at the moment and was surprised and pleased to see one of those i3s outside my hotel this morning. If it’s there tomorrow I’ll try to find out who it belongs to.
Ha, awesome!
Turns out it’s a taxi. So I might make use of it!
Ha, that’s cool. Good way to expose people to EVs.