In a recent episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the TechCentral podcast, GridCars founder Winstone Jordaan told host William Kelly why the biggest obstacle to a national electric-vehicle (EV) charging network is not the charger itself but the software that runs behind it. The episode’s show notes summarise the conversation.
Jordaan explained that the physical hardware, the charging point, is relatively straightforward to install. Deciding where to put a charger and how much power to feed it is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is building the billing and roaming systems that identify each driver, handle payments and alert users to faults or outages. That is also why, in his view, a network cannot rely on tap-to-pay alone: operators need to know who each user is so they can contact drivers about faulty chargers or upcoming outages.
By Jordaan’s calculation, a charge point operator, a company that owns and runs public chargers, needs about 1,000 chargers to be profitable. He put South Africa’s total at roughly 650, which means that, on his numbers, an operator at the scale of today’s whole market would still be below break-even.
Jordaan also shared his long-term view: he expects around 500,000 chargers to serve a car park of 11 million vehicles. Dividing one by the other gives roughly one charger for every 22 vehicles, though that ratio is our arithmetic, not a figure he is quoted as giving.
Beyond the numbers, Jordaan expects EV uptake to accelerate sharply and the disruption to reach well beyond the motoring sector. He has said that a third of one industry audience could be out of business within five years.
For businesses considering entry into the EV charging space, the message is that the capital outlay for hardware is only part of the equation. Billing platforms, customer identification and a 24-hour call centre, which Jordaan says needs seven staff on its own, are part of the cost of competing.
Jordaan also dismissed the common argument that there are not enough chargers, saying that thinking so reflects poor information.
GridCars began building its backend platform in 2010, three years before the first EVs arrived in South Africa in 2013, according to the show notes.
Why the software problem is harder than the hardware problem
The pattern Jordaan describes is not unique to South Africa. Globally, charge point operators have converged on a standard called OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol), which lets a charger from one manufacturer talk to a billing and management system from another. Without that kind of interoperability, a network built one charger at a time becomes a collection of incompatible islands, each with its own app, its own payment method and its own fault-reporting process, which is exactly the fragmented experience that discourages everyday drivers from trusting public charging at all.
For South African investors weighing entry into this space, the implication of Jordaan’s argument is that capital raised for EV infrastructure should be weighted toward the platform, not just the concrete and copper. A charger with no reliable back-end becomes a stranded asset the moment a driver has a billing dispute or a fault goes unreported.
GridCars’ own charging network map is the primary source for the current state of South Africa’s EV charging infrastructure referenced here.
