Musk wants to open a Tesla dealership in South Africa

It’s been almost 30 years since Elon Musk left South Africa to start a new life in North America. Now, the billionaire may be about to bring his Tesla electric cars back home.

“Probably end of next year,” the CEO of Tesla replied to a South African fan on Twitter, who asked him when a store would open in the country of the businessman’s birth. “Amazing — I’m first in line when it happens!” replied the individual. The person who tweeted him was Plettenberg Bay’s Riccardo Spagni, who is the lead maintainer of the cryptocurrency monero.

Tesla has stores across the globe, including the US, Germany, China and Australia. But it has none in Africa, which has been broadly left out of the electric car revolution Tesla pioneered. Lower average incomes and poor power infrastructure mean petrol-powered cars — often bought second hand — dominate most markets on the continent.

South Africa is Africa’s most industrialised economy, but it’s not immune to those challenges. Cash constraints and delayed power plants at state utility Eskom have led to rolling blackouts. While it’s not unheard of to see an electric car on the road, they remain the preserve of the super-rich, and charging stations would be hard to come by.

Musk, 47, left South Africa for Canada after graduating from high school in Pretoria in 1989, still five years before the end of apartheid. But the self-made billionaire and founder of SpaceX is still well known in the country.

Opening a Tesla store there could be a popular move.  — Reported by John Bowker, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP