There’s a palpable buzz around South Africa’s New Energy Vehicle (NEV) scene. The sales figures are undeniably exciting, more than doubling in a year. There’s talk of our famed grassroots innovation, the kind that brought the world the ‘Please Call Me’, poised to execute another stunning leapfrog.
Linda Cele from WesBank isn’t wrong when she says, “We have a proven history of solving for our unique local challenges.”
The organic demand, the growing charging network surpassing global density averages, and the stabilising grid all point to a market itching for ignition. It feels like the beginning of a great South African success story.
But while we’re meticulously charting our domestic course, a glance northwards reveals a competitor that isn’t just navigating—it’s building the highway. Morocco is not quietly positioning itself; it is thunderously declaring itself as the continent’s undisputed automotive powerhouse, and its ambitions are fundamentally different from ours. Where we see a promising market for adoption, they see a global factory for export.
The numbers are staggering. Morocco’s production is sprinting towards one million vehicles in 2025, a figure that will see it overtake Italy—a cornerstone of European automotive heritage. This isn’t happenstance. It is the result of a brutal and brilliant industrial strategy. They leveraged a trifecta of advantages we can only dream of: strategic location a stone’s throw from Europe, labour costs averaging a mere $106 per vehicle, and, most critically, aggressive policy designed to seduce global giants.
While our government touts a welcome but belated 150% tax incentive to attract manufacturers, Morocco’s government has already landed them, backed by billions in Chinese investment for entire EV battery supply chains.
They are not just assembling cars; they are building the ecosystem, from gigafactories to anode plants, capitalising on their own vast reserves of critical minerals like cobalt and phosphates. They have turned themselves into the most cost-efficient manufacturing hub on the planet, a magnet for companies like Hyundai looking to bypass Western tariffs and tap into European and American markets via free trade agreements.
So where does this leave South Africa? We risk becoming a fascinating case study of market potential hamstrung by industrial caution. Our 25% import tax on EVs—a full 7% higher than for internal combustion engines—is a paradox that perfectly encapsulates our lag. It protects a legacy industry while actively punishing the consumers driving the new one. We are celebrating organic demand that is succeeding in spite of policy, not because of it.
Our conversation, as Cele rightly points out, is about Total Cost of Ownership for fleet managers. Morocco’s conversation is about global supply chain dominance. Their growth is export-led, industrial, and strategically geopolitical. Ours remains, for now, inwardly focused on domestic consumption.
This is not to dismiss our progress. The surge in NEV sales is real and impressive. The potential of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a game-changer that South Africa is uniquely positioned to exploit.
As Luthando Vuba of Standard Bank highlights, emerging hubs in Morocco, Nigeria, and Kenya are driving demand for South African components. Africa’s automotive sector is projected to grow to $33 billion by 2033, and we accounted for over 28% of it last year. This is our undeniable strength: deep manufacturing expertise and a formidable component sector.
But herein lies the critical divergence. Morocco is positioning itself as the continent’s factory floor; we risk remaining its premier parts shop. We have the chance to supply the components for the vehicles they are building at a phenomenal scale. It’s a valuable role, but is it ambitious enough? Are we content to feed the value chain, or do we want to own and control more of it?
The path forward requires a dual strategy. First, we must urgently address the domestic policy contradictions. Meaningful consumer incentives and a rationalisation of import duties are essential to accelerate local adoption and make our market attractive for local production.
Second, and more importantly, we must leverage AfCFTA with a ruthless, strategic focus. We may not be able to compete with Morocco’s labour costs, but we can outpace them with our depth of engineering skill, our sophisticated financial services, and our established component manufacturing base. We must become the brain and the nervous system for Africa’s automotive growth, supplying the high-value intellectual property, the sophisticated parts, and the EV technologies that every new assembly plant on the continent will need.
The race is on. Morocco is sprinting ahead in the manufacturing volume game. South Africa’s opportunity is to innovate and integrate at a higher level. We have the history of solving local challenges with unique solutions. Our next great challenge is not just to adopt the electric vehicle revolution, but to define Africa’s place within it—not just as a market, but as a master of its own industrial destiny. The journey is underway, but we must look up from our own dashboard to see who is already pulling ahead.
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