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South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills.

Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the Southern African Electric Mobility Association, said the past three years have changed what is available locally. Battery-electric models are now selling below R400 000 and range has improved sharply. But 64% of cars sold in South Africa go for under R400 000, and import duties plus the ad valorem levy keep most electric models above that line.

The commercial side is moving faster. Light-, medium-, heavy- and ultra-heavy-duty electric trucks are now available in South Africa rather than being promised in presentations, Parmar said, with fleets reporting total cost of ownership savings of up to 25%. The economics improve the further a vehicle travels, which makes high-mileage fleets the first adopters rather than the last.

He pointed to the 12.5GW of private solar installed in South Africa by the end of 2025, on figures from the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association, as an underused base for charging. Fleets can charge from their own generation during the day and fall back to the grid overnight.

On manufacturing, Parmar said six of the seven passenger and light commercial vehicle manufacturers in South Africa now have batteries entering local production, and four have secured hybrid investments. What is missing is a tier-one battery cell supplier and an incentive framework for zero-emission vehicles to sit alongside the one government has run for local vehicle assembly since 1995.

With European export markets tightening towards 2035, he said, the window for that decision is closing.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013.

In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never the hard part. Working out where to put a charger and how much power to feed it is straightforward. Building the billing and roaming systems behind it is not.

That is also the answer to a question drivers keep asking: why can’t you just tap a card? Because the network needs to know who you are. If a charger is faulty, or the power is about to go off, Jordaan wants to be able to call you.

He is candid in the interview about the economics of building a national EV charging network. A charge point operator needs around a thousand chargers to be profitable, by calculation. South Africa has roughly 650 in total. A 24-hour call centre alone takes seven people. Long term, he expects 500 000 chargers for a car parc of 11 million vehicles.

Jordaan also thinks adoption is about to accelerate sharply, and that the disruption will reach well beyond motoring. He recently told one industry gathering that a third of the room would be out of business within five years.

On charging infrastructure as a reason not to buy an EV, he is clear about one thing: there are enough chargers. Thinking otherwise, he says, is just being poorly informed.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

Episode 8 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – opens with William Kelly on his soapbox, clipboard in hand, and a simple demand: keep left, pass right.

Too many South African drivers, he argues, treat the left indicator as an invitation to be overtaken rather than a signal of intent, and lane discipline would save the country time, fuel and a great deal of frustration, he opines.

Duncan McLeod wonders where enforcement of that sort ends – cameras and artificial intelligence deciding when you should pull over? – which leads neatly into the episode’s main interview.

In episode 8, William and Duncan get stuck into:

• An interview with Dillan Fernando, CEO of Tracker, on what a vehicle-tracking business becomes when cars generate far more data than a stolen-vehicle recovery unit ever needed – and what happens once AI is pointed at it.

• The grid maths – William sets a total Eskom grid figure of roughly 47GW against a national fleet of about 13 million vehicles, of which only some 10 000 can be plugged in at all. His conclusion: EV charging is nowhere near being an Eskom problem, and on current trajectories most of us will not live to see the day it is.

• EV education in South Africa – how much do buyers actually understand about what they are being sold, and whose job is it to tell them?

• Volvo gets Gemini – Google’s assistant has begun rolling out to Volvo cars, starting in the US and reaching models going back to 2020. Fixed voice commands give way to something closer to conversation: brainstorming a holiday, finding a decent coffee stop on the route, summarising an incoming text and dictating a reply in another language, or simply asking for something calming on the stereo.

• Tesla lands in Africa – in Casablanca – Morocco, not South Africa, is where Tesla has put its African base, with a corporate presence in Casablanca and a Supercharger network built out since 2021 across Casablanca, Tangier, Rabat, Fez, Marrakesh and Agadir. Its cars still cannot be bought through official channels here. Is Africa a sleeping EV giant? The hosts are unconvinced.

• Trade deals and battery minerals – India signs a motor industry trade deal with the EU while, at home, Itac proposes bringing EV battery minerals into the list of qualifying standard materials under APDP2, at a standard value added rate of 50% against the usual 25%, provided they originate in Sacu or the SADC region. William’s question: is anyone actually going to build the batteries?

• Mad Chinese cars – BYD’s Tang and the Denza B8, plus XPeng’s GX, the brand’s first three-row luxury SUV.

• A moment of silence – too soon, Honda? The hosts mark the company’s retreat from its electric vehicle strategy.

Also in the mix is the new metal heading for South African showrooms. The Jaecoo J5 and the iCaur are on the way, along with the BYD Atto 2 DM-i, a plug-in hybrid whose entry-level version carries a 7.8kWh Blade battery – a remarkably small pack for a car you are expected to plug in. It arrives loaded with equipment, which prompts a broader observation: Chinese brands have spoiled South African buyers so quickly that the goalposts have already moved.

To contrast all that smoothness with something built for a purpose, there is the new Thula – the locally engineered electric game viewer that featured in episode 5 – back for another look.

The episode closes with Hot or Not, where the Toyota FJ, the BYD Atto 2 DM-i, the iCaur and the Thula game viewer all go under the hammer.

Watch S1E8 of Watts & Wheels now. Don’t forget to subscribe, and please share the show with your friends and colleagues. TechCentral

Amazon’s Leo satellite constellation is coming to South Africa in 2027 through Herotel. TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen speaks to Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha about Evry, the brand that will sell Amazon Leo to South African homes, and about how a company with no local licence walked into a market that has kept Starlink out for years.

Botha explains why low-Earth orbit satellite technology changes the equation for anyone living beyond the reach of fibre and fixed-wireless services.

He addresses the awkward questions directly:

• How does Amazon get in without giving up 30%?

• Does a wholesale-retail split leave anything behind in the country?

• Would he sign the same deal with Starlink tomorrow?

• What about the regulatory asymmetry?

Also covered: what Evry is likely to cost; why studies on the market’s size range from 480 000 to 2.4 million potential customers; why Herotel is taking registrations for a service that has not launched commercially anywhere; whether Evry will cannibalise Herotel’s own fibre and wireless base; what Vodacom’s stake in Maziv means for Herotel’s independence; and why LEO satellites are viable now when the idea is 40 years old.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Discovery group CIO Derek Wilcocks on personalised Vitality, the limits of AI coding and why growth beats cost-cutting.

Derek Wilcocks, group CIO at Discovery, says AI has finally given the group the ability to do something it has wanted to do since Vitality launched more than 25 years ago: personalise it.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Wilcocks said Personal Health Pathways is built on AI models trained on member data collected since 2000, and used only with a member’s consent. For most of Vitality’s history, the targets were identical for everyone. The programme can now suggest a walk, a glucose test or a cancer screening rather than a run.

Wilcocks spent 23 years at Dimension Data, now NTT Data, where he ran Internet Solutions, served as group CIO and led the Middle East and Africa business as CEO. He was the 12th person to join Internet Solutions and founded a subsidiary that sold the first firewalls into South Africa’s banks. He joined Discovery in 2018.

In the discussion, he is candid about the limits of AI in software development. Discovery is measuring efficiency gains of roughly 20-25% in some areas from AI coding tools, but developers in large corporates were spending only a quarter to a third of their time writing code to begin with. Senior developers use all the major agentic coding frameworks, though the group has spent heavily on guardrails constraining what those tools are allowed to do.

Wilcocks also discusses:

• Why Discovery’s health and life businesses buy no traditional enterprise software, developing everything from scratch;

• Why he thinks Elon Musk is right about the direction but wrong about the timing on the end of source code, and the three problems standing in the way – explainability, efficiency and maintainability;

• Why the decade in which knowing how to code was enough to walk into a job has come to an end;

• How a federated model with around 14 CIOs across the group is held together by mandatory central security, privacy and ethics functions – and what happened when Discovery’s data scientists were asked to simplify the AI rules written for them;

• Why he sees AI at Discovery as primarily a growth story rather than a cost-cutting one, with staff retrained and redeployed rather than cut; and

• His route into computers, from a Commodore Vic-20 with 4KB of memory to the father who cured him of wanting to be an electrical engineer.

Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral