Vodacom and SmartOps Fleet want to put up to 55 000 vehicles on e-hailing platforms in the next nine to 12 months, 66% of them electric, Engineering News reported recently. That is about 36 000 electric vehicles in an industry that today runs just a few hundred.
Uber’s electric service launched in Johannesburg in November 2025 with 70 cars from fleet partner Valternative Energy, with 350 promised by the end of January. By the end of March it had more than 120, mostly in the Sandton-Rosebank corridor, with demand outstripping supply. In July, Bloomberg News reported that Valternative was “in the process of deploying 360 cars”.
Bolt launched an electric category in Cape Town in May and is targeting 500 EVs by the end of 2026, according to a Bolt statement that put its South African driver base at around 40 000. Even if both companies hit their targets, their roughly 860 EVs would equal about 2% of Bolt’s driver partners alone.
Nobody publishes an industry-wide count, and the transport department says it cannot. Licensing of individual e-hailing vehicles sits with provincial regulatory entities, so “centralised national data is not currently available to confirm the precise number of registered e-hailing vehicles or specify how many of them are electric”, department spokesman Collen Msibi told TechCentral.
The running costs do favour electric. Valternative’s Mahomed Jeewa told Bloomberg that about R160 of charging buys the range of R400 of petrol. But drivers mostly rent, paying about R2 500/week including maintenance and insurance, Bloomberg reported. Johannesburg driver Thandiwe Mlinjana said that in her best week she took in about R6 200 and, after rent and about R1 100 for charging, kept about R2 600. “If they gave us the option to buy the electric cars instead of renting them, it would be 10 times better,” she said.
What about robotaxis?
But EVs are expensive. Imported EVs attract 25% customs duty, against 18% for petrol and diesel cars from the EU. Across the whole market, Naamsa counted just 2 622 battery-electric car sales in the first eight months of 2026, but still more than double the 1 088 sold in all of 2025.
In 2016, Uber’s then sub-Saharan Africa MD, Alon Lits, predicted that self-driving cars would take “five to 10 years” to commercialise. That window has closed with no deployment here, though robotaxis now carry paying passengers in the US. Uber has since committed more than US$10-billion to robotaxis in at least 28 cities by 2028, none of them reported to be in Africa.
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The transport department said in its 2020/2021 annual performance plan that it would “develop regulations for the introduction of such technology”. None has been published, and the law has not caught up: Msibi said the legislation has no provisions “for vehicles with no drivers”.
The case for robotaxis is safety. South Africa recorded 11 418 road deaths in 2025, with human behaviour the leading cause, according to the Road Traffic Management Corporation. The case against them is strong, too, not least that tens of thousands of drivers depend on e-hailing.
What do the Cybercab sums say?
Tesla’s two-seat Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, opened to public rides on Tesla’s paid robotaxi service in Austin in September. Elon Musk has promised a price of under $30 000 and, as Axios reported, running costs of about 20 US cents a mile.
Bloomberg priced a 9.5km Johannesburg trip at R82 on Uber Electric, or about R8.63/km. But that is what the rider pays; Uber’s commission in South Africa has historically been about a quarter of the fare, which would leave a robotaxi on Uber’s platform about R6.47/km.
At the rand’s current rate of about R16.41 to the dollar, Musk’s target works out to about R2.04/km. Morgan Stanley’s estimates are about $0.74/mile for Tesla and $1.36 for Waymo, or R7.55/km and R13.87/km. It is not clear whether those estimates allow for empty trips to pickup locations, which earn nothing.
In Sandton, after Uber’s cut, only Musk’s unproven target makes money: at Morgan Stanley’s estimate, a Tesla robotaxi would lose about R1/km, and a Waymo far more. Tesla could avoid the commission by running its own network, as it does in Austin, but even then the Morgan Stanley figure would leave almost no margin.
At $30 000, a Cybercab costs about R490 000 before shipping, and roughly R615 000 after the 25% duty, before ad valorem tax and VAT. Valternative’s cars cost about R190 000, Bloomberg reported. The difference of about R425 000 equals more than three years of Mlinjana’s best-week take-home pay.
A robotaxi’s pitch is removing the driver. In Sydney or Austin, the driver is the most expensive part of a ride. In Sandton, the costliest part is the car and keeping it running, which is why the near-term story is more likely to be cheap Chinese EVs, human drivers and better finance. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
