South Africa’s favourite electric car lie

Contrary to what many South Africans think, it is easy to keep an electric vehicle (EV) charged for regular use when load-shedding is in effect.

One of the most common questions people have asked MyBroadband while we’ve tested several EVs in recent years is how long they take to charge.

The answer is not straightforward, as the time taken depends on various factors, including the charging point’s power output and what the car itself supports.

Some people are taken aback when you explain that it may take around 10 hours to charge an EV from empty to full at home and are quick to deduce that load-shedding will, therefore, be a huge problem.

On social media, the comment sections on articles about new EVs are often filled with remarks claiming buyers will have to stay home during load-shedding.

However, one point that is often difficult to bring across is that you rarely have to charge an EV from anywhere near empty to full.

Many EV owners in South Africa will explain that they plug in their car whenever an opportunity arises — ideally when it is parked at home with electricity tariffs lower than when using a public charger.

With many EVs, shorter “spurts” of charging are also better for long-term battery life than longer charging sessions.

Likely adding to the misconceptions around actual charging times is how different this approach is from filling up a petrol or diesel car.

It is not uncommon for drivers to only head to the pumps once their fuel light comes on and then to fill up completely.

MyBroadband has first-hand experience charging an EV while stage 6 load-shedding was in effect. Suffice it to say, we had no excuse to stay home.

Even when using a slow portable charger with speeds lower than 3kW, there were easily enough hours of power overnight to refill the battery with all the energy it had spent and still do a daily commute.

The EV’s battery was at 51% state-of-charge when we set off to work at the beginning of the week.

Despite a two-way daily commute of roughly 34km, plugging the car in overnight each day resulted in the battery being back at 100% charge by early Thursday morning.

Crunching the numbers

However, our commute was slightly shorter than the 43km average Numbeo estimates South African motorists drive every day.

To help put the issue to bed, MyBroadband performed a few calculations to show why most EV owners are not concerned about not being able to go to work or perform daily tasks during load-shedding.

According to EVDatabase, the average energy consumption across hundreds of EVs is about 19kWh per 100 kilometres or 190Wh per kilometre.

The average South African commuter driving 43km per day will consume roughly 8.17kWh in the average EV.

It will take about two hours and 12 minutes to refill the battery with all the energy consumed using a slow 3.7kW portable charger.

On a 7.4kW fixed home charger, the fastest available to single-phase homes, it will take just over an hour.

With the typical hours of outages under load-shedding, even stage 8 won’t be enough to stop the average EV owner from charging their car back to full with a slow charger if they drive up to 100km per day.

Those with a 7.4kW charger could even cover around 150km to 200km per day and still recharge all their daily consumed energy overnight during stage 8.

The first table below shows how long it will take to refill the energy consumed from an average EV battery when covering various distances.

The second table shows what percentage of time a household will have electricity under various load-shedding stages and the minimum time for which they will have power overnight.

Average and minimum time with power overnight under load-shedding