My last tank of petrol was 7,000km ago

By Dr Patrick Narbel

Seven thousand kilometres ago, I filled a petrol tank for the last time. Since then, my car has run on sunshine.

Those kilometres taught me something simple. The technology is ready, and the sums are decisive: running the car on my own solar power costs a fraction of petrol and less than grid electricity. The obstacle is not the vehicle or the network but resistance to change and the range anxiety…

I did not switch to an electric vehicle to make a statement. I did it because I care about clean energy and because I wanted to know, honestly, whether the promise holds up on a real South African driveway rather than in a glossy brochure. I chose a mid-size electric SUV with a 68-kilowatt-hour battery and about 400km of practical range. After 7,000km of mostly urban and suburban commuting, my consumption has settled at 13.3 kilowatt-hours per 100km. It is so efficient that I often go more than a week between charges. The driving is smooth and quiet. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is what it exposed about how we price and think about electricity in this country.

Charging turned out to be a software problem, not a hardware one

Like most new owners, I started simply, plugging into an ordinary wall socket. It worked technically but not practically: ten hours overnight returned only half a battery. Fine for the occasional top-up, hopeless as a routine.

So, I installed the home charger delivered with the vehicle, which needed a qualified electrician, and promptly found a new problem. Run the charger, the geyser and the oven at once, and the main supply gives up. More than once, the house went dark a few minutes after I plugged in. The answer was not a bigger connection or a second electrician. It was a dynamic charger, one that reads household demand in real time and quietly eases the car back when the rest of the house is drawing power. No more tripped breakers, no more watching the load. The hardware was never the obstacle. A small piece of intelligence was all it took, and it changed everything.

The problem was never generating the power. It was using it

Running the car was only part of what I was after. The real aim was to charge it from my own roof, which meant upgrading the house to a GoSolr XL system: a 12-kilowatt hybrid inverter, 15 kilowatt-hours of battery storage and just over 8 kilowatts of solar panels. Most days it produces well beyond anything the car needs.

The constraint is not production. It is timing. Like most commuters, I get home late; the home battery then carries the house through the evening, and I miss the best hours of daylight. The car’s efficiency is what rescues me. Because I so rarely need a daily charge, I can wait for the weekend, when the car sits at home under a working sun. Through winter, roughly 60% of my charging comes straight from solar. Across the year I expect about 70%, and in high summer, with a little discipline, close to 100% is within reach. The sun was always willing.

Public charging is thinner than petrol, and less of a problem than you would think.

The question I am asked most is what happens when you travel. Honestly, South Africa’s public network is still sparse next to the density of filling stations, but it is improving faster than most people assume, with new sites appearing regularly and others being upgraded. Over 7,000 km, I have had to change my route to accommodate charging exactly once, on a longer trip from Cape Town to De Hoop, through the Karoo, to Calitzdorp and back.

Fast charging is genuinely excellent, right up until someone else is already using the only charger when you arrive. Public charging typically costs between R5.00 and R8.50 per kilowatt-hour, so it is not the cheapest energy option, but it is convenient and increasingly available. Range anxiety, in my experience, has quietly been replaced by charging planning.

On my driveway, the numbers are not close

Then there is the money, which is where the argument becomes uncomfortable for the status quo. A full charge drawn entirely from the grid on my Cape Town tariff costs about R280. Once you account for the fact that around 70% of my energy comes from my own roof, the effective cost of a full charge falls to roughly R85, and in peak summer it can approach zero. My previous car, an efficient VW Polo, averaged about 5.5 litres per 100km. At R25 a litre, covering 400km took around 22 litres, or roughly R550. A full 68 kWh charge drawn entirely from the grid on my Cape Town tariff costs about R280. Because around 70% of my charging comes from my own roof, the effective cost of a full charge falls to roughly R85, and in peak summer it can approach zero. That puts my driving costs at about a sixth of what I used to spend on petrol. The gap grows wider against a car closer in size to mine: a petrol SUV such as a Hyundai Creta, using around 8 litres per 100km, would need 32 litres for the same 400km, costing about R800.

What strikes me most, 7,000km in, is how quickly the whole thing became ordinary. Charging took some experimentation; the house needed a few upgrades, and long trips ask for a little more planning than petrol. But once those pieces were in place, it became unremarkable. The car is no longer a project. It is another appliance in the home, one that increasingly runs on sunshine rather than fuel.