Johannesburg - Despite the fact that it is the more expensive option, petrol still dominates the South African passenger car market.
The reasons given are many and varied: diesel cars are seen as slow, noisy and dirty - a perceptual hangover from the bad old days of mechanical diesel injection pumps - none of which is all that true today in most cases.
What is true is that, almost always, the equivalent car with a diesel engine is still significantly more expensive to buy than a comparable petrol derivative, so it takes a lot of driving to recover the difference through fuel savings.
At the same time, the latest petrol engines - smaller in capacity, turbocharged and cleaner burning thanks to direct fuel-injection - are making the same leaps in fuel-efficiency that we saw in diesels during the 1990s with the advent of common-rail fuel-injection and piezo-electronic injectors.
Andre Oelofse of industry analyst Lightstone Auto, which has been tracking fuel share across South Africa over the past 20 years, points out that in August 1994 petrol held 99.9 percent of the passenger car market (that does not include bakkies, buses and commercial vehicles, but does nowadays include SUVs), with diesel at just 0.1 percent.
Over the first eight months of 2014, by contrast, petrol held a 79.7 percent market share, with diesel on 20.1 percent and hybrid cars and SUV's (irrespective of what fuel their combustion component used) making up just 0.2 percent of South African passenger vehicle sales.
That's roughly in line with the world's two biggest markets - the United States and China - but in strong contrast to the EU markets, where more than half (55 percent) of all cars sold run on diesel.
BANANA BOYS DON'T LIKE DIESEL
It's when you break it down by provinces that things get really interesting: taking the figures for the first eight months of 2014, KwaZulu-Natal car buyers showed the highest preference for petrol; 81.6 percent of passenger vehicles sold in that province ran on petrol whereas, by contrast, only 75.7 percent of Free Staters opted for petrol, giving that province the highest percentage of diesel-car sales at 24.2 percent.
Sales of hybrid cars and SUVs were highest in Gauteng (197 or 0.2 percent for the first eight months of the year), while just three Eastern Cape car buyers (0.04 percent) went for hybrids.
That's partly due to the perception (not entirely incorrect) that so-called 'clean' (less than 5ppm sulphur) diesel fuel is not yet widely available in the remoter areas of South Africa, says Oelofse, but there's also a 'chicken and egg' factor in play here.
Eastern Cape franchises don't stock many hybrid models because they don't see a demand for them - but car buyers don't choose hybrids because there are very few on showroom floors in that province.
Oelofse adds that there is a far greater variety of petrol models than diesel cars available to South African buyers (another chicken and egg story?) which also tips the scale in favour of petrol, while making the point that hybrid sales are pushed down by the fact that hybrid powertrains are generally offered in more upmarket (read: expensive) models.
BOTTOM LINE
It may take some time, says Oelofse, but as car-buyers become more environmentally-friendly, this might influence the percentages in favour of diesel cars, as it has done in Europe, and accelerate the sales of hybrids - even in the conservative Eastern Cape.