EV uptake in South Africa will happen faster than believed, says Volvo SA MD Grant Locke

The car industry is changing rapidly, and even though the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) in South Africa is still relatively slow, it is changingcould be the future.

A man who is at the centre of this evolution is Grant Locke, who was appointed MD of Volvo Car SA in July 2025.

Locke brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in commercial business, with a focus on financial services.

Before joining Volvo at its headquarters in Sweden, he was known particularly in South Africa’s financial services sector with founding OUTvest, an investment service platform developed within OUTsurance.

At the start of his career, the Economics Honours graduate also did a stint in the UK with investment manager Schroders, which he said gave him a "phenomenal" grounding in understanding how the markets work.

Just two years after moving to London with his family, Locke went through a baptism of fire when the 2008 financial meltdown hit as the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a stock market crash.

"When the market falls the revenue falls in an asset management company... but it was also a lesson about the trust element around your customers... I developed a deep fascination with how the markets work in the asset management industry in general, but it was a more general grounding as well in understanding business and trust."

It was in 2024, back home, and after selling OUTvest to Alexforbes, that Locke received what he describes as a once-in-a-lifetime offer to join Volvo Cars in Sweden.

"My role was basically to help them develop their internal operating lease business and help look after the financial services aspect of Volvo Cars globally. That quickly morphed into something that was much more dramatic in a way and in a very short time I was looking after global financial services."

"I changed my entire life in the space of 15 days! Moving the family over there gave me the opportunity to watch my children develop and grow some sort of resilience, and also for myself. In terms of what I learned... I changed those industries, but the fundamentals of business remain, and the cornerstone of most of that is actually just trust."

In June 2025, Locke got another never-to-be-repeated offer from Volvo, this time to take up the position of MD of the business in South Africa.

Volvo Cars SA, as a local OEM importer, is effectively a wholly owned company of Volvo Cars globally, he explains.

"It's responsible for the importation of Volvo cars, the managing of the dealer network, marketing and pricing. So, again, it goes back to the fundamentals of business: Partly trust, but also the relationship of the functions of marketing, the functions of operations, of product and pricing - all of those things together."

"I think that's been the biggest lesson over the past few years - you can changge someone's entire industry, but as long as they understand the fundamentals of how the various functions of a business work together almost like levers and if you work in a trustworthy and ethical way, most of the time you're probably going to be OK."

Locke sketches the history of Volvo's development of EVs, highlighting the company's core ethos of sustainability and safety.

When they started on the EV journey, the company's mindset was already ahead of its time, he says.

"They took a chance with electrificaiton... and the first plug-in hybrid in the mass market that I can think of was the XC90 that launched in 2014. Then they went on a strong drive to continue that process, dropping the diesels in 2019 in SA. And  whilst it was a major hit to the sales numbers here, in reality the mindset was more 20 years into the future."

It is only really now, after all of those years of engineering, that you're starting to see the true result of the products emerging, the Volvo Car SA MD says.

 And he himself is astonished by the rate at which the maturity of the brand's EVs is evolving.

"They started on relatively low ranges, they were quite inefficient in some ways, the software could be difficult to operate... but this is maturing at a very rapid rate, and it's not just Volvo."

While the total market share of EVs in South Africa is still very small, he says, people are not fully aware of the speed at which this change is happening.

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the wide-ranging interview withe the Volvo Car SA MD