African solution for scooting into future on a lean, green machine
The idea for Green Scooter came to Fezile Dhlamini-Mapela six years ago as he tussled with the inordinate distances that South Africans typically walk each day.
The “first mile, last mile” problem refers to the distances that citizens must traverse to get from their homes to public transport, and then the additional distance they travel to their final destination after disembarking from a bus or train or other mode of transport.
It is an issue faced the world over but one which is particularly acute in SA where the architecture of apartheid ensured black South Africans were settled a distance away from white suburbs and business districts.
The problem extends to business too. When moving goods to customers’ homes, the modes of transportation, particularly for the last mile, can be inefficient.
“That’s pretty much where it started out. Trying to figure out a solution for first-mile, last-mile transportation, be it passenger transport or commercial cargo transport,” Dhlamini-Mapela says. Fresh out of university in 2016, the 24-year-old registered his business and has not looked back.
Green Scooter is a distributor and manufacturer of an electric scooter in association with Swedish partner Clean Motion. The scooter, known as the Zbee, is a fully electric vehicle that can be charged from any socket for three to four hours at a time.
With three wheels and a fibre-glass body, the vehicle has room for a driver and two passengers, or alternatively for cargo, and can carry 280kg in total. Prices range from R90,000 to R110,000 excluding VAT and the vehicles are also available on lease.
With its substantially lower fuel cost, the Green Scooter is cost-competitive compared with other vehicles used for short to medium-distance travel, such as conventional mopeds.
The scooters are used by a range of clients, including the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town and the Club Mykonos holiday resort in Langebaan.
Green Scooter customers are typically small and medium enterprises that use them for deliveries, Dhlamini-Mapela says. “It’s well suited for that at 8c/km. Including wear and tear, it is 44c/km. Compare that to an internal combustion engine on a conventional moped at R2.20/km.”
The Covid-19 pandemic brought both good and bad news for Green Scooter.
Faced with lockdowns and uncertainty, potential customers were reticent to spend money on anything new. But the crisis presented opportunity too, and at the start of the hard lockdown in April 2020, Dhlamini-Mapela and partners launched a sister company, Scooter Treats, which facilitates the delivery of food and other goods between Soweto and Alexandra using the Green Scooter.
“We’re proving that you don’t have to use a big vehicle to do a delivery that’s beyond even 20km. You can literally use a vehicle which is 100% sustainable which will cost you less than R3 per trip.”
In five years of operating Green Scooter, DhlaminiMapela says interest in the electric offering continues to grow. “The market is increasing, people want it. We get about 20 to 30 order requests a week.”
However, access to financing for customers is not always easy through the banks and other traditional funding routes. Green Scooter is seeking to engage with financiers to smooth the way for its customers.
The next focus for the company is to ramp up local production to serve the growing pipeline of orders.
Beyond the SA market, Dhlamini-Mapela hopes to expand the offering into North Africa and South America. A solar-powered vehicle may also not be a too-far-distant reality, he says.