We all have seen documentation about the prospects that car manufacturers are providing or hope to provide as far as new developments in cars are concerned. Simply put, it is the promise, or at least the prediction, that cars are all going to move from being fossil fuel driven to being electric cars. The adverts generally show cars which are in a highly polished state and the adverts themselves are presented by fairly clever-looking engineers who describe the new developments with some degree of sophistication.

A recent advert showed cars as having a range of about 300 km with a charge time of about 35 minutes. The advert so presented then proceeds to set further applications of the car without pointing out the glaring fact that this operation time and recharge time are hardly mind shattering. Actually, that is not entirely true. It is mind shattering if the car is not going any particular distance; for example, 300 km is not even halfway from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. If one extends the range to be such that the car repeats the 300 km distance on a regular basis, the driver will have to be content with what amounts to a fairly limited travel time with regular intervals of an hour.

Nothing is normally said in the doc which is attached to the description of the travel of these cars about what happens when the car is held back by some factor, such as traffic, which causes it to travel far more slowly. I’m not playing fair if I raise the topic of the car being held back by there being a power outage of up to two hours but perhaps we should be kind and assume these will not always happen.

To get back to the main topic, it seems that there is a belief by most car suppliers that all vehicles will move into short-distance operation and that this will become the norm. One can also bring to the discussion factors such as hybrid cars and various variants, but for the interim let us look at the 300 km electric car.

A question is: Does this type of vehicle have any value outside a vehicle which travels no more than 300 km? To put it another way, is there any need for a vehicle which travels more than 300 km in so far as how often are these found under normal operations? The need for such vehicles is largely dependent on the efficiency of the vehicle and this can very much vary, depending on the imposed load, which itself is dependent on the load as a result of the travel distance and the terrain.

The fact is that the manufacturers have thought all of this out and they have a plan for an optimised travelling distance and load of a car. This plan is, without doubt, based on some financial model. Unless you believe in miracles, the vehicle so predicted does not have its place in Africa. The roads are too bad, the traffic too dense and, in general, distances are too far, and not the least of which is the fact that electricity supplies are too unreliable.

We can reasonably believe that use of electric cars travelling a distance of some 300 km is effectively a no-go for Africa. By this one does not mean for parts of Africa – the implication is for the whole of the continent.

Electric cars are really only viable for people who live in cities, thereby removing them from a large section of the buying public. This means that electric cars may well enjoy a brief popularity before they are abandoned forever. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we will find an affordable, green, abundant alternative to lithium for the batteries that will make the car more affordable for the man in the street and increase its range beyond the current limitation of 300 km, making it more versatile and desirable.

Something to remember is that the very first cars in public use were . . . electric cars.