No diesel clatter, no exhaust fumes, and no engine vibration while creeping up on wildlife. Electric propulsion may be particularly well suited to safari driving, and South African start-up Thula Solutions has designed a rugged 4×4 ‘bakkie’ specifically to exploit those advantages.

Its Electric Safari Vehicle, or ESV, is not Africa’s first battery-powered game viewer. Electric Land Rovers and converted Toyota Land Cruisers have already been roaming reserves in Botswana, South Africa, and Tanzania for years.

What makes Thula different is that it has been designed from the outset around an electric drivetrain rather than converted from an existing diesel 4×4.

That brings benefits beyond emissions. Guides can talk more quietly, passengers can hear birds and animals instead of an idling diesel engine, photographers suffer less vibration, while instant torque and precise low-speed control are particularly useful on rocks, sand, and steep tracks.

There may even be benefits for the animals themselves. Research comparing electric and combustion-engined safari vehicles suggests that mammals exhibit shorter escape behavior when approached by quieter EVs. Silence is no license to get closer, however, and guides must still respect wildlife and maintain appropriate distances.

Built in South Africa

The current Thula uses a 65 kWh battery, all-wheel drive, and two electric motors, and has space for up to eleven occupants. Thula quotes a driving range of around 200 kilometers.

The project is also heavily South African. The chassis was developed with the University of Pretoria’s Vehicle Dynamics Group, battery packs come from Cape Town specialist Balancell, and production engineering is handled by Hi-Tech Automotive in Gqeberha.

The story goes back much further than the latest vehicle. Founder Gary Davies, himself a qualified safari guide, started experimenting with electric game-drive vehicles around 2017.

After first converting a Land Cruiser, Thula teamed up with Bloemfontein manufacturer Brandt BRV and presented an early purpose-built prototype in 2022. That vehicle already showed why conventional EV priorities, such as huge batteries, motorway speeds, and ultra-fast charging matter remarkably little in the bush.

Who needs 500 kilometers?

A typical safari outing may cover only around 30 kilometers. Lodges usually run one drive early in the morning and another late in the afternoon, with the vehicle returning to the same base in between.

At around 60 kilometers per day and Thula’s claimed consumption of roughly 30 kWh/100 km, daily electricity use would be only about 18 kWh. In theory, the 200-kilometer range is enough for roughly three days of normal game drives.

More importantly, the vehicle spends several hours parked at the lodge in the middle of the day, exactly when a solar installation is producing the most electricity. It is almost the ideal EV duty cycle: low daily mileage, low speeds, frequent returns to the same depot, and predictable periods of downtime.

Thula offers 10 kW three-phase AC charging, allowing a full charge in around six hours, while single-phase charging is limited to 6.6 kW. The vehicle can also provide up to 6.6 kW of onboard AC power for equipment. DC fast charging is conspicuously absent, but for its intended role it may hardly matter.

Charging remains the weak point

The picture changes when the vehicle leaves its home reserve. Public charging infrastructure remains sparse in many parts of southern Africa, particularly within national parks. That makes the Thula much more practical for a lodge with its own solar panels, battery storage, and charging point than for someone traveling hundreds of kilometers between reserves.

Other operators already show that this model works. Cheetah Plains in South Africa, for example, charges its converted electric Land Cruisers from an off-grid solar-and-battery installation.

Cost is another consideration. Thula quotes R1.75 million, excluding VAT, which is currently about €94,000. That is expensive, although heavily converted Land Cruiser game viewers can also cost well into seven figures in rand.

The bigger challenge may be reliability and support. Toyota’s traditional safari workhorses have decades of proven durability behind them and can be repaired almost anywhere in Africa. A high-voltage fault in a remote reserve requires much more specialist knowledge.

From bush tracks to waterways

Thula is applying the same philosophy on the water. Alongside the ESV, it offers configurable electric safari boats developed with electric propulsion specialist ePropulsion. The company pitches them at lodges operating on rivers, lakes and wetlands, where silence and zero local emissions are arguably even more valuable than on land.

Rather than offering a single fixed boat, Thula uses a modular system with 12, 20, or 40 kW electric motors, in single- or twin-motor configurations, and battery capacity sized to each lodge’s range and charging requirements. Solar charging can make the boats completely off-grid, while up to 5 kW of onboard AC power can run fridges, coffee machines or even induction cooking equipment.

For wildlife tourism, the advantages closely mirror those of the ESV. Passengers hear birds and water rather than an outboard engine, photographers avoid engine vibration, and there is no risk of unburnt fuel or lubricants being discharged into the water. Thula also argues that electric propulsion reduces both maintenance and running costs.

Thula still has something to prove here. Its own information states that the ESV is undergoing homologation, while key 4×4 figures such as wading depth, ground clearance, and approach and departure angles are not prominently published.

Still, the vehicle illustrates an interesting EV paradox. One of the world’s most remote environments, almost devoid of public charging infrastructure, may actually be one of the places where electric propulsion makes the most sense.