Diesel Is Not Going Anywhere: The Decades-Long Reality of South Africa’s Energy Future

Part One: The Numbers Tell a Different Story

In 2025, battery electric vehicles accounted for just 0.17% of the roughly 597,000 new vehicles sold in South Africa — and that figure actually represented a decline from 2024. Total BEV sales fell from 1,231 units to 1,018 units, even as the broader automotive market expanded by 15.7%. South Africa’s automotive industry, meanwhile, remains overwhelmingly dependent on internal combustion engine vehicles, with 99% of domestically manufactured cars still running on petrol or diesel.

These are not the statistics of a market on the cusp of transformation. They are the statistics of a market where the fundamentals — affordability, infrastructure, grid reliability, and the sheer scale of existing ICE vehicle ownership — remain stubbornly, unmistakably in place.

Consider what it would take to meaningfully displace diesel in South Africa’s transport and industrial sectors. The country would need not merely more EV passenger cars, but viable, affordable electric alternatives for heavy freight trucks, agricultural equipment, mining vehicles, and construction machinery. These sectors run on diesel not because of habit or inertia, but because diesel provides unmatched energy density, reliability, and refuelling speed for high-demand applications. Battery technology capable of matching diesel’s performance in these sectors is still in early commercial stages globally — and is decades from widespread deployment in South Africa’s context.

“The energy density and operational flexibility of diesel fuel in heavy industry, agriculture, and long-haul logistics has no near-term electric equivalent in the South African market.” — Leano Energy, Industry Analysis, 2026

Part Two: Why the Barriers to EV Adoption Are Structural, Not Temporary

South Africa’s EV adoption challenges are not temporary inconveniences that a few more charging stations and a budget subsidy will resolve. They are structural, deeply embedded in the country’s economic and infrastructural reality — and they will take not years but decades to address.

The electricity grid cannot support mass EV adoption. Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor sits at just 65% as of early 2026. The national grid, already strained, would require massive capital investment to support even a fraction of the charging load that widespread EV adoption would demand. The government’s own policy documents acknowledge that a stable, resilient power supply is a prerequisite for the EV transition — a prerequisite South Africa has not yet met and will not meet quickly. Until the grid is fundamentally rebuilt, the case for diesel as the reliable, grid-independent energy source of choice remains ironclad.

Affordability excludes the vast majority of South Africans. Electric vehicles in South Africa currently cost between R350,000 and R850,000. In a country where the median household income sits well below R200,000 per year, and where most vehicle buyers depend on second-hand ICE vehicles purchased for under R150,000, EV ownership is not a realistic near-term prospect for the overwhelming majority of South Africans. Consumer subsidies comparable to those in Europe do not exist here. The government’s current policy incentivises EV manufacturing — not EV buying. Until that calculus changes dramatically, the diesel-powered vehicle fleet will continue to grow, not shrink.

Charging infrastructure is nowhere near adequate. South Africa has fewer than 400 public charging points compared to approximately 4,800 petrol and diesel stations. By early 2026, the ratio of EVs to charging stations had worsened to 11:1 — moving in the wrong direction. Some SANRAL highway charging approval processes have taken over 1,000 days to complete. Against this backdrop, the idea that EV infrastructure will meaningfully displace the liquid fuel distribution network within a decade is not credible.

Diesel is deeply embedded in the productive economy. South Africa’s agricultural sector runs almost entirely on diesel — tractors, irrigation pumps, transport refrigeration, grain dryers. The mining industry, the engine of South Africa’s foreign exchange earnings, uses diesel in quantities that dwarf the passenger vehicle fleet. Long-haul road freight — the arteries of the entire supply chain — is overwhelmingly diesel-powered, and heavy electric trucks capable of matching diesel range and payload are nowhere near cost-competitive in South Africa. These sectors transition when the alternative technology is proven, affordable, and operationally superior. That moment is not close.

Part Three: What the Government’s Own Policy Reveals

It is worth reading South Africa’s EV policy carefully, because it reveals more about the scale of the challenge than it does about the imminence of transformation.

The government’s flagship incentive is a 150% tax deduction for qualifying investments in EV and hydrogen vehicle production, effective from March 2026. Note what this incentive targets: production, not consumption. The government is trying to attract manufacturers to build EVs in South Africa — not to help South Africans buy them. The reason is straightforward: the consumer market is not ready.

The government has also set a target for 10% of newly produced vehicles to be electric by 2026, rising to 30% of all vehicles sold by 2030. These are aspirational figures. Actual BEV penetration in 2025 was 0.17%. Reaching 30% market share in four years from that baseline would require a transformation of purchasing behaviour, infrastructure, pricing, and grid capacity that has no precedent in any comparable developing economy. For context, Morocco — Africa’s EV leader — achieved just 2.6% EV market penetration in 2025, despite having a more stable grid, lower import duties, and more concentrated urban consumer markets than South Africa.

“South Africa has taken a production-first approach to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, focusing on boosting local manufacturing rather than offering direct subsidies to consumers.” — iMotoNews, January 2026

South Africa’s 2050 net zero commitment is similarly instructive. It is a goal twenty-four years away — and even that commitment is rated “Insufficient” by the independent Climate Action Tracker, which notes that South Africa added 800 MW of new coal capacity in 2024 with more planned. A country still expanding its coal fleet and whose grid runs at 65% availability is not one that will have transitioned away from liquid fuels within a decade.

Part Four: The Diesel Industry’s Horizon Is Long

None of this means that South Africa will not eventually transition toward cleaner energy. It will. But “eventually” and “soon” are very different things — and the liquid fuels industry, particularly diesel distribution, has a long and productive horizon ahead of it.

Consider the timeline realistically. South Africa’s current fleet of diesel-powered vehicles, machinery, and generators represents trillions of rands in capital investment. That fleet turns over slowly. The average vehicle age on South African roads is over eleven years. New ICE vehicles sold today will still be running in 2040 and beyond. The diesel infrastructure — refineries, pipelines, storage depots, service stations, distribution networks — has been built over decades and operates at a scale that no alternative energy infrastructure will replicate quickly.

Even optimistic projections suggest that EVs will reach 30% of new vehicle sales in South Africa only by 2030 — a target most independent analysts consider unreachable given current trajectory. New vehicle sales represent only a fraction of the total vehicle fleet. For diesel consumption to decline meaningfully across the transport and industrial sectors, the majority of the existing fleet would need to be replaced. At any realistic pace of fleet turnover, that process extends well past 2040 and, for heavy industry and agriculture, well past 2050.

The Just Energy Transition Partnership has mobilised USD 12.8 billion in international financing for South Africa’s green transition. That sounds significant — until you consider that South Africa’s own government has estimated the full financing need at USD 98 billion over five years for the energy transition alone, before accounting for transport. The gap between aspiration and funded reality is enormous.

Part Five: Diesel in the Era of Energy Complexity

There is a further dimension often overlooked in the EV narrative: the growing role of diesel not as a relic of the past, but as the essential backup and bridging fuel for an energy system in transition.

South Africa’s load-shedding crisis generated enormous demand for diesel-powered generators across homes, businesses, hospitals, data centres, and public facilities. This demand did not disappear when load-shedding paused — it crystallised into a permanent expectation of backup capacity. Diesel generators provide what the grid cannot guarantee: certainty.

The emergence of solar-powered EV charging stations, celebrated in recent press coverage, actually illustrates diesel’s continued relevance rather than its obsolescence. These off-grid solar charging installations are being built precisely because the grid cannot be relied upon. When the sun does not shine and the batteries are depleted, diesel generators step in. The energy transition in South Africa is not a replacement of diesel — it is a layered, complex, multi-decade process in which diesel continues to play an indispensable role.

“Without a stable electricity supply, traditional grid-connected EV chargers could face disruptions, limiting their effectiveness.” — VUKA Group, cited in EV24 Africa, 2025

Part Six: What This Means for Leano Energy’s Customers

For Leano Energy’s customers — farmers managing irrigation and harvest logistics across the Western Cape and Northern Cape, mining contractors supplying equipment to chrome and platinum operations in Limpopo and the North West, construction companies building roads and housing across the country, and fleet operators running refrigerated transport between Johannesburg and Cape Town — the message is straightforward.

Your business runs on diesel. It will continue to run on diesel for the foreseeable future. The infrastructure you have invested in, the fleet you have built, the operational knowledge your teams have accumulated around diesel-powered equipment — none of that is becoming obsolete in the next decade, or the one after it.

South Africa’s energy transition is real and it is underway. But it is also slow, complex, incompletely funded, and constrained by structural realities that cannot be wished away by policy targets or press releases. The EV revolution that is remaking passenger car markets in Oslo and Amsterdam will reach Polokwane and Upington — but it will do so gradually, partially, and over a timeline measured in decades rather than years.

At Leano Energy, we are not complacent about the long-term direction of travel. We watch the policy landscape carefully. We engage with our customers on their own energy planning horizons. We understand that South Africa will, one day, be a very different energy economy. But we also understand something equally important: between now and that day, this country needs diesel — reliably supplied, competitively priced, and delivered by partners who understand the operational realities of doing business in South Africa.

That is what Leano Energy does. And by any honest reading of the data, it is what South Africa will need us to keep doing for a very long time.