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Episode 7 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral's electric motoring show – opens with mock outrage: the South African Car of the Year results are in, and the Alfa Romeo Junior didn't take the overall title. Hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod demand a recount – though they concede the Junior's best design win takes some of the sting out of a competition in which Chinese brands claimed half the categories, with the Jetour T2 named overall winner.

In episode 7, William and Duncan get stuck into:

Ferrari's first EV – and the meme storm that greeted it. Is the departure from Maranello DNA brave or bewildering? And with Jony Ive involved in the design, are we looking at a glimpse of the Apple car that never was?

How to build a car, part 2 – continuing last episode's deep dive, William unpacks how "local content value" really works, why local plants no longer build the sub-R400 000 cars that make up 64% of South African sales – and why the tariff question is becoming impossible to ignore as India signs a trade deal with Europe and Morocco builds EV factories.

An interview with Mike Whitfield, CEO of Stellantis South Africa, on the group's plans for the local market – including a possible play in micromobility.

The death of the subscription model – why paying monthly for heated seats deserved to fail, and how all-inclusive Chinese cars helped kill it.

Robotaxis get real – Hyundai's Motional targets Las Vegas by end-2026, while Tesla's full self-driving goes live on European roads.

Solid-state batteries – Finland's Donut Lab claims 400Wh/kg and a website – donutbelieve.com – to prove the sceptics wrong.

Mad Chinese cars – a gargantuan luxury SUV with zero-gravity massage seats (foot massage included) and BYD's Fang Cheng Bao two-seater – the electric sports car the hosts reckon Ferrari should have built.

The episode closes with Hot or Not, where the Ferrari EV and Toyota's R1.18-million bZ4X – the company's first battery-electric model for South Africa – both feel the heat.

Watch S1E6 of Watts & Wheels now. Don’t forget to subscribe, and please share the show with your friends and colleagues. TechCentral

Pick n Pay has switched on an AI shopping companion called Penny inside its asap! app, and in this episode of the TechCentral Show, retail executive for omnichannel Enrico Ferigolli takes editor Duncan McLeod through what it does and why it matters.

Built on Google's Gemini models, Penny lets customers build a grocery basket by asking for what they want in their own words – by voice, text or photo – instead of searching and scrolling. Tap the "Ask" button, request a carbonara recipe, and Penny returns the method alongside a carousel of options for each ingredient to drop into the basket. It handles re-orders, meal planning to a budget and ingredient substitutions, and it reads photographs, too: Ferigolli describes snapping a handwritten shopping list and having Penny build the basket from it.

In the conversation, Ferigolli is candid about the limits. Penny does not place orders yet – it assembles the basket and hands the customer back to checkout – and its language support, while broad, is stronger by voice than by text and still maturing for South Africa's African languages. He explains why Pick n Pay tested several large language models before settling on Gemini, how the system draws on the app's own search, order history and Smart Shopper data rather than plugging Gemini straight into its databases, and where a retail-media layer fits in.

For more detail on the launch, see TechCentral’s full report on Penny and how it works.

Ferigolli discusses:

• How conversational shopping changes the asap! experience

• Why Gemini won on accuracy, speed and cost

• What Penny can and can't do at launch

• The multilingual and multimodal ambitions behind it

• How the 2025 asap! rebuild set this up, and what comes next

Pick n Pay is "a little bit behind" in online grocery, Ferigolli concedes in the podcast – but with Penny and the features to follow, he reckons it will "get ahead really, really fast".

Don't miss the discussion. TechCentral

Vehicle tracking has come a long way from its origins as a stolen vehicle recovery tool. Today, the data generated by connected fleets – covering driver behaviour, fuel consumption, route efficiency and real-time events – has elevated telematics from an operational afterthought to a boardroom conversation.

In this episode of TCS+, host Nkosinathi Ndlovu sits down with Silvia Schollenberger, chief commercial officer at Tracker, to unpack what that evolution means for South African businesses.

Schollenberger explains how the questions fleet managers and C-suite decision-makers are bringing to Tracker have changed significantly over the past three to five years.

Watch the video

Where procurement conversations once centred on cost-per-unit tracked, customers now want to understand how fleet intelligence can reduce total operating costs, improve driver safety and unlock strategic advantage.

Schollenberger walks through the typical technology journey a business takes – from basic asset protection to a fully integrated fleet intelligence stack – and identifies the triggers that tend to accelerate that shift.

The conversation gets into the practical realities of fragmentation: what businesses actually lose, commercially and operationally, when they run disconnected point solutions that don’t talk to each other. Schollenberger also shares an anonymised case study illustrating how fleet intelligence drove outcomes that went well beyond efficiency metrics, influencing strategic decision-making at the highest level.

On the vendor selection side, she flags the most common mistakes fleet managers make when evaluating telematics solutions and outlines what “end to end” genuinely looks like for a Tracker customer through solutions offered in partnership with Geotab International. Safety, she emphasises, remains foundational – and she highlights some of the newest features available to help protect both drivers and assets in the field.

The episode closes with a look at how Tracker and the broader South African telematics industry stack up against global peers – a useful benchmark for any business trying to gauge where local capability sits relative to international best practice.

Whether you manage a handful of vehicles or a large national fleet, this episode offers a clear-eyed view of where fleet technology is heading and how to make it work for your business. TechCentral

It’s been roughly 18 months since AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” – using natural language alongside AI tools to write and deploy code – and the market for AI coding assistants has grown rapidly since. IBM’s entry into this space is Bob, an AI-powered development assistant built for enterprise environments.

In this episode of TCS+, Nathi Ndlovu speaks to David Spurway, IBM Power AI and security principal for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, about what sets Bob apart from the growing field of AI coding tools.

Bob’s roots trace back to IBM i, IBM’s integrated operating environment long used in enterprise and legacy deployments. That heritage is significant: while many AI coding tools target greenfield development, Bob is designed with organisations running legacy stacks – including IBM i and mainframes – firmly in mind. That said, Bob’s capabilities extend well beyond those environments, making it relevant to a broader range of enterprise development teams.

One of the more distinctive aspects of Bob is how IBM has positioned it – not as a traditional IDE but as a development partner. The “anthropomorphisation” is deliberate: Bob is designed to collaborate, not just autocomplete. That partnership quality shows up most clearly in onboarding. Rather than waiting months for a new developer to gain enough familiarity with a code base to contribute meaningfully, Bob can dramatically compress that ramp-up time by helping them navigate and understand existing code from day one.

Bob also performs real-time code reviews, a capability that Spurway suggests could prompt teams to rethink their development workflows altogether. IBM provides support to help organisations manage that transition, including guidance on integrating Bob into existing processes. Partners such as Edgetec play an important role in helping organisations manage this shift.

On the question of language support, Spurway addresses how teams can verify whether their specific tools and languages are compatible with Bob. Security is another focal point: the underlying models powering Bob are discussed in the context of enterprise risk, with Spurway explaining how Bob's code generation is designed to follow security best practices.

For those looking to explore the platform, Spurway outlines how individuals and organisations can access Bob, and closes with a summary of the key benefits for developers, teams and enterprises alike.

Don’t miss the interview. TechCentral

Episode 6 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – sees hosts William Kelly and Duncan McLeod wade into the most opaque corner of the South African car market: tariffs, subsidies and what they really cost the people buying the cars.

William opens with a deep dive into why locally sold vehicles are priced the way they are, unpacking the difference between SKD (semi-knocked-down) and CKD (completely-knocked-down) assembly, the all-important “local content value” that drives a car maker’s tariffs and incentives, and why economies of scale make it so hard for a country building thousands of cars a year to compete with rivals building millions.

The episode’s centrepiece is an interview with Donald MacKay, CEO of XA Global Trade Advisors, who demystifies how South Africa’s automotive support regime has worked since the late 1990s – and who actually pays for it.

The hosts then turn to the Chinese surge in local showrooms: Chinese brands already accounting for roughly 15% of the market once GWM, MG and others are counted in; and a run through the best-sellers, led by the Chery Tiggo 4.

Then it’s review time. William drives the all-electric Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce – 207kW, made in Poland, yours for R995 000 – and falls hopelessly in love (it’s rather sad to watch, if we’re honest).

Also in the mix: a jaw-dropping Volvo safety clip in which an EX60 is launched – airborne – into a steel pole; and a Rory Sutherland-inspired riff on why the self-driving car isn’t really a car at all but a “room on wheels” – a mobile office, a meeting room, even an income-generating asset – plus what an acceptable robot-driver accident rate should look like next to human drivers.

The show closes with Hot or Not. TechCentral