The question everyone asks about electric taxis is: when does it charge? The Century City pilot has a specific answer, and it's built around how the taxi industry already works. We featured the eKamva project in our electric taxis in SA coverage and interviewed founder Justin Coetzee on our podcast — now it has a launch date.

A typical Century City taxi does roughly 120km on its morning shift, then parks for three to four hours during the off-peak before the afternoon rush. That midday gap is the charging window.

The eKamva has a range of 180-220km per charge. Fast chargers at Century City can replenish a vehicle within one hour. So even a taxi that didn't start the day fully charged can comfortably cover both the morning and afternoon shifts with a midday top-up.

GoMetro has spent the past year mapping and tracking every taxi route at Century City to confirm this. The infrastructure is being designed to eventually support all 120 vehicles that use the interchange, charged during the midday off-peak.

These vehicles are designed for fixed urban routes. They won't replace long-distance or inter-provincial taxis — the range isn't there yet. But for the kind of routes that shuttle 25,000 people into Century City every day, the numbers work.

This isn't a single test vehicle on a single route. Fifteen taxi associations that use the Century City interchange are involved. GoMetro will test the vehicles with different associations every couple of weeks, then order and deploy more as the trials progress.

Coetzee confirmed the timeline and scale in a recent interview with Cape Talk's Lester Kiewit: start testing in October, scale progressively, and target full electrification of Century City routes over three to four years.

The project consortium includes Powerfleet (formerly MiX Telematics), HSW, ACDC Dynamics, and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Engineering — the same engineering pipeline we mapped in the Stellenbosch founders piece, where GoMetro appears as entry #6 with R233 million raised. The testing was conducted on existing taxi routes in Stellenbosch before moving to Century City.

We sat down with Justin Coetzee on our podcast before this launch date was confirmed. He talks through GoMetro's journey from a simple Cape Town transit app to an internationally-backed fleet management platform leading the electric taxi transition.

This news first appeared in our 27 March ‘26 newsletter on how Grocify gets you the best grocery prices. 

Read our original feature on electric taxis in SA. See how GoMetro fits into the broader Stellenbosch founders ecosystem. And explore how two more Stellenbosch ventures are electrifying freight on the N3 corridor.

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