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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

After a few months away, Watts & Wheels returns for the fifth episode of season 1, with William Kelly in studio and Duncan McLeod dialling in from the Southern Cape.

Watch episode 5 now

In episode 5, William and Duncan dive into:

• The new Suzuki Across, an entry-level SUV priced from R350 000 to R465 000 that squares up against Suzuki’s own Grand Vitara – and the welcome return of physical knobs and buttons, a trend Volkswagen is following, too.

• Dongfeng’s expanding EV range – the Nami 01, Nami 06 and E3 – a clutch of sub-R500 000 models turning up the heat in South Africa’s budget EV price war.

• Why fuel pain may be a tipping point: AutoTrader reports a jump in EV searches after the latest petrol and diesel hikes, with cheap used EVs vanishing fast.

• The spiralling cost of car ownership, from ad valorem “bracket creep” to research showing it takes nearly 15 000 minimum-wage hours to buy a VW Polo locally, against roughly 1 600 in the UK.

• A Polo milestone – 500 000 of the current generation exported – and finance minister Enoch Godongwana lifting the ministerial car price cap to R1.1-million.

• Whether Johannesburg’s City Power should be rolling out public EV chargers while it struggles to keep the lights on.

The “Crazy Chinese” segment serves up a Yangwang – BYD’s luxury arm – swimming across a lake, before the episode’s highlight: an in-studio interview with Gary Davies, the South African behind a purpose-built electric game-viewing vehicle. Dubbed the “Bentley of the bush”, it pairs a 63kWh battery and two 150kW motors with clip-on body panels and a biomimicry-inspired cooling fan, engineered locally with the University of Pretoria.

William then lives with Leapmotor’s C10 range-extended EV for a week and comes away pleasantly surprised – seriously comfortable, remarkably quiet and frugal, if let down by a fiddly key and an all-touchscreen cabin.

The show signs off with Hot or Not. TechCentral

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Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to business strategy and customer outcomes to deliver value.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Idesoh said AI is maturing rapidly into heavily regulated industries such as financial services, and that banks must use the same technology to counter adversaries who are themselves deploying it.

Idesoh has held senior technology leadership roles across several large organisations, including group CIO at Old Mutual and leadership positions at insurer Aviva and pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, before joining Absa as group CTO.

In the interview, Idesoh unpacks the thinking behind Absa's R2.4-billion software impairment in its 2025 financial year – a 13-fold increase on the prior year's write-off – explaining that it was driven not by a single large asset but by more than 100 smaller ones, and reflected three things:

• A fundamental shift in group strategy under new group CEO Kenny Fihla towards a Pan-African, client-led model;

• A changing regulatory regime; and

• The accelerating pace of technological change in AI, data and cybersecurity.

He also reflects on how banking technology has evolved – from the water-cooled mainframes of the 1990s to today’s far smaller IBM z16 machines and the move towards cloud and service-based consumption – and why the real challenge is not the mainframe itself but the decades-old Cobol software paradigms still running on it.

Listen to the interview

Idesoh also discusses:

• The noise around Anthropic’s “Mythos” model and what AI-driven vulnerability discovery means for bank cybersecurity, arguing that organisations should not panic but must become adept at using AI to find and remediate vulnerabilities at speed;

• Whether such models should be released to the public immediately or to large institutions first; the impact of AI on software development jobs, and his view that the traditional junior-to-senior developer pyramid may give way to apprenticeship-style models;

• How Absa is encouraging its technology talent to keep pace through leadership, early-adopter advocates and gamified celebration of new skills;

• The bank’s deployment of agentic AI, including its customer-facing AI agent and an internal IT-support agent that has handled queries from 11 000 colleagues with a 90% resolution rate; and

• His own path into technology, from an aspiring airline pilot who realised aircraft were becoming “flying computers” to a career that began on a BBC Micro.

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

South Africa has fewer than 400 public electric vehicle charging stations – up from zero just 15 years ago – and EV adoption remains stubbornly slow. Yet Charge, formerly known as Zero Carbon Charge, is betting big that a coast-to-coast network of off-grid, renewable-powered charging stations is exactly what’s needed to fire up the local market.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Joubert Roux, co-founder and director of Charge, joins TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu to make the case for the company’s ambitious, R1.8-billion plan to roll out a charging station every 150km along South Africa’s national highways – and to explain why he believes the company is taking on “a timing risk, but not a business risk”.

Roux walks TechCentral through the December 2024 launch of Charge’s first site near Wolmaransstad and the unit economics underpinning the roll-out: just seven vehicles a day at each station are needed to reach Ebitda break-even. He also explains why every facility is designed to operate entirely off-grid, citing data showing that EVs charged on Eskom’s coal-heavy network emit 5.8 tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year, more than a comparable petrol car at 4.4 tonnes.

The conversation also tackles Charge’s unconventional fundraising strategy: a tokenised public offering on Mesh rather than a JSE listing, planned for June 2026. Roux argues that South Africa’s institutional capital is “extremely conservative” and that tokenisation will finally let ordinary investors into an infrastructure deal that has historically demanded R1-million minimums. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has already committed R100-million.

Roux and Ndlovu also discuss:

• How landowners hosting Charge stations receive 5% of charging revenue, and the rural economic development case that sits behind that model;

• The offtake agreement with transport aggregator Zimi covering 50% of capacity at upcoming N3 corridor sites;

• Charge’s formal objection to Sanral’s proposed policy giving it powers over businesses within 60m of national roads or 500m of interchanges, and the broader regulatory headwinds facing EV infrastructure;

• How BYD’s planned 1MW supercharger network and incumbent operators like GridCars – which already records 5 000 charge sessions a month – are reshaping the competitive landscape;

• Plans for 35MW truck-charging facilities and a long-term target of 120 stations across the national route network; and

• Roux’s prediction on when South Africa will hit its EV tipping point – and the two ingredients he says the market still needs: sub-R500 000 EVs and a genuinely reliable national charging network.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Companies large and small are pouring capital into AI projects, chasing the promise of efficiency, speed and scale. But as Jason Harrison, chief operating officer of The Up&Up Group, argues in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, the upfront price tag tells only a fraction of the story – and many South African boards are signing cheques without fully understanding what they’re buying.

Harrison uses The Up&Up Group’s own experience in experimenting with and implementing AI to glean insight into the gap between the large promises by the technology (and its Silicon Valley pundits) and harsh realities of stalling projects in enterprises, especially at the integration layer.

The conversation digs into the costs that rarely make it into a chief financial officer’s spreadsheet:

• Policy and governance, Harrison argues, are not soft considerations – they are line items, often substantial ones.

• The costs of error: the reputational damage, financial exposure and legal risk when copyrighted material slips into outputs or autonomous agents go off-script.

• Agents that run amok, with companies then only discovering the problem once the cloud bill lands.

Beyond the balance sheet, Harrison flags AI’s energy footprint as a societal cost the industry is still reckoning with.

AI adoption is accelerating despite these risks and Harrison describes the current moment as a kind of nuclear arms race, driven by share-price pressure and a deep fear of being last. Much of today’s AI spend, he suggests, is Fomo (“fear of missing out”) dressed up as strategy. For tech leaders trying to make sober decisions inside a hype cycle, separating signal from noise has become a leadership skill in its own right, he says.

Suggested solutions include a “test and learn” philosophy where many small, inexpensive AI experiments are run throughout an organisation before viable instances are scaled appropriately.

Harrison cautions against one-size-fits-all deployments and argues that governance must sit close to the work rather than only in the boardroom. Quarter-to-quarter measurable objectives matter, he says, but only if they live inside a long-term strategy.

Despite his sober-minded view on AI’s high costs, Harrison still has an optimistic perspective on the technology and its potential to transform society, especially on the African continent. While the developed world is using AI to get answers, Harrison suggests African organisations may end up using it to learn how to think – a subtle but important distinction, and a timely note for any leader weighing their next AI investment.

Don't miss this discussion. TechCentral