For Sipps Maswanganyi, a safari guide with 20 years’ experience in the African bush, it was one memorable sighting that sold him on electric safari vehicles.

“I could hear this buffalo panting heavily deep in the bushes,” recalls Maswanganyi, head guide at Cheetah Plains, a luxury outfit in SA’s Sabi Sands Game Reserve. After those faint sounds, he found a 680kg bovine on its last breaths, being taken down by seven stealthy lionesses. “If I was in a noisy diesel vehicle, I would have driven right past, not hearing a thing, and we would have missed it all.”..