Most of us have spent our entire lives around petrol and diesel cars, so an electric vehicle (EV) can still feel like the unusual choice. I sometimes wonder what the conversation would sound like if history had run the other way.
Imagine we had all grown up with electric cars. You plug in at home, leave in the morning with a full battery, drive quietly through traffic, and have very little routine mechanical servicing to think about. Then I arrive with a clever new invention. It runs on a liquid fuel that somebody has to extract, move around the world, and get to a filling station before you can use it. You cannot make it on your roof. It also brings more routine servicing.
I suspect that sales pitch would be a hard one. And the premise is less far-fetched than it sounds. Electric cars competed seriously with steam and petrol more than a century ago. By 1900, they accounted for around a third of the vehicles on American roads, according to the US Department of Energy.
Your filling station is already at your house
One of the biggest anxieties around EVs is charging, because we picture a petrol tank and immediately ask where the nearest public charger is.
For drivers who can charge at home, that question comes up far less often. If you can plug in where the car sleeps, it charges overnight and is ready the next morning. You stop making a separate trip to buy fuel at all.
Long trips are a different matter, and here petrol and diesel still hold a real advantage. Filling stations are everywhere, and a tank fills in five minutes. South Africa has in the order of 650 public charging points across roughly 445 sites, about one charging site for every 11 fuel stations. The gaps are genuine, including sections of the N1 through the Karoo and the N2 between East London and Durban. The network is expanding while newer EVs are travelling further between charges.
EVs have less going on under the bonnet
EVs still sound exotic to some people, which is funny when you look at how mechanically simple the drivetrain actually is. A combustion drivetrain relies on far more mechanical complexity to turn fuel into motion. An electric motor is much simpler, which is one reason EVs generally need less routine servicing.
Regenerative braking takes some getting used to. Once you are accustomed to the car slowing as you lift off the accelerator, and to putting energy back into the battery while it does, going back to a conventional car feels wasteful.
And then there is the noise. We have grown up associating engine noise with performance. I enjoy a good engine note too, but once you have experienced proper acceleration without all the noise, that has its own appeal.
You cannot make diesel on your roof
If you have rooftop solar, you can generate some of the energy that moves your car yourself. There is no equivalent option with diesel.
Eskom took the country through the whole of the 2026 winter without load shedding and, by early September, had gone some 476 days without it. That does not mean South Africa’s electricity problems are solved.
EVs are already doing much heavier work
This is already moving beyond passenger cars. We are running an 80-tonne electric truck at a mine where its battery can be swapped in about five minutes. That gets the truck back to work without waiting for a full recharge.
EVs still cost more upfront in many cases, and the economics depend on how the vehicle is used. Enough mileage is needed for the lower running costs to offset the higher purchase price.
Turning the argument around is useful because it shows how much of our reaction to EVs comes from what we are used to. Petrol and diesel defined what a car was supposed to be for generations. Once you imagine electric coming first, some of the habits we take for granted begin to look very different.
If electric cars had become the default a century ago, I still struggle to imagine anyone convincing us to switch to petrol today.
* Paul Plummer is Everlectric co-founder and chief commercial officer.