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JOHANNESBURG – Toyota South Africa’s third-largest vehicle exporter, says the country must switch to producing electric cars for Europe in the next five years, saying the local industry needs to adapt or lose the market.

The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa (NAAMSA) has warned that South Africa will forfeit its vehicle-export market entirely if manufacturers don’t start producing electric vehicles.

NAAMSA Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mikel Mabasa told the South African Transport Conference that SA’s biggest export markets – the United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) have announced they will ban imports of internal combustion engines from 2030 and 2035, respectively, as part of a shift to zero-emission engines.

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Mabasa said the automotive industry in Australia was wiped out when it failed to adapt to new technologies. Australia is not importing all its vehicles.

“The reason being the Australian government at that time did not respond speedily to some of the technological advances that the rest of the world was moving into. SA is likely to follow the same pattern if we are not going to progress quickly in some of the policies that we have and strengthen our capacity to produce new-energy vehicles.”

Andrew Kirby, President and Chief Executive Officer of Toyota South Africa, said that for SA to “secure our exports to Europe we will have to transition to producing batter-electric vehicles for export between 2027 and 2030.”

About 63 per cent of eh country’s vehicle production is exported to Europe and other markets, of which Toyota SA is responsible for 20 per cent. 50 per cent of production at its Prospecton plant is geared towards exports to Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America.

“As manufacturing based in SA, we need to be prepared to be exporting zero-emission vehicles to Europe. That’s the most important thing and we need to do this as fast as we can, otherwise we lose that entire market for SA, which is the majority of our export vehicles,” Kirby said.

Local manufactures will have their work cut out, as they try to make this transition, or be left behind.