The Model Y was announced as Europe's best-selling new vehicle of 2023 earlier this month. Image: Tesla
Tesla boss, Elon Musk, has reiterated comments from five years ago that the all-electric marque won’t be available in South Africa anytime over the country’s import duties.
Although known that at least two variants of the brand’s Model X are present on local soil, one owned by renewable energies firm, Rubicon, an official market debut has again been wiped off the floor in spite of the growing uptake of electric vehicles.
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Commenting on a question on social media platform X as to when Tesla will make local landfall, Musk wrote, “import duties are super high in South Africa to protect the domestic industry. Doesn’t make sense for Tesla, given that electric cars are not locally made”.
First asked in 2019 about Tesla, Musk, who since bought and renamed the site previously known as Twitter last year, said, “would love to [bring to Tesla to South Africa], but import duties are extremely high, even for electric vehicles”.
The apparent ruling-out comes after the American automaker announced in May last year it had decided to stop producing the Model X and Model S in right-hand-drive over the apparent difficulty of relocating the largely left-hand-drive-market focused steering gear to the right.
Made before a major facelift and software update to both models, an unnamed Tesla spokesperson told Britain’s Autocar at the time that the cancellation would also help the brand increase production in addition to improving product quality that has attracted significant criticism in the States for being below expectations for a premium brand.
While it remains unclear as to whether the smaller Model 3 and Model Y will follow the same route in losing their right-hand-drive availability, it now seems seemingly certain that a local Tesla market launch won’t be happening anytime soon.
This comes after the Model Y emerged as the best-selling vehicle in Europe last year with sales of 279 000 units, and after the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition submitted its so-called White Paper Report supporting an EV transition in December last year.
“As South Africa’s most successful non-commodity manufacturing industry, it is critical to the domestic economy that the automotive industry achieve its potential through to 2035 and beyond. A failure to transition risks a decline in the contribution of the industry to the economy,” an extract from the document read.
The official gazetting of the documents came months after BMW confirmed an investment of R4.2-billion into its Rosslyn factory outside Pretoria for assembly of the next generation X3, including the plug-in hybrid variant, as a means of circumventing the import duties on sourcing it from a different factory.
Despite the document’s release, no exact details regarding funding has yet been made as this will only be detailed next month as part of Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget speech.
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