AIDC: Building the Table for a New Automotive Era
This Women’s Month, AIDC Chairperson Meloney Van Eck tells Enterprise Africa that South Africa’s automotive industry is at a turning point as production demands change and labour dynamics continue to shift. She is driving transformation across the organisation, and encouraging OEMs to follow suit. In an industry marked by speedy adjustment, now is the time to be ambitious she says.
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South Africa’s automotive industry has spent decades building its reputation as one of the continent’s manufacturing powerhouses, anchoring hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributing more than 5% of national GDP. But the ground beneath that reputation is shifting fast. Chinese brands now hold 16.8% of the passenger car market, up from 11.2% just a year earlier, and 15 Chinese manufacturers are competing for South African buyers, nearly double the number active in 2024. At the same time, electrification is redrawing the rules of global trade, and the industry that once measured its competition in Detroit and Stuttgart now measures it in Shenzhen and Hefei too.
Steering a response to these pressures sits the Automotive Industry Development Centre (AIDC), the Gauteng government-owned agency tasked with keeping South Africa’s automotive sector globally relevant. Chairperson Meloney Van Eck explains the scale of the challenge, but she is equally clear that competitiveness cannot be separated from inclusion. For her, the two goals are the same project.
“I don’t celebrate women’s month seasonally. I think it’s something that should be looked at every single day of the year because of where we come from as women,” Van Eck says. “In the AIDC, as a parastatal on behalf of government, leading the automotive sector, we have found that the industry is not completely transformed. When we talk about transformation, we talk about localisation, inclusion of women, and inclusion of historically disadvantaged people in South Africa.”
Her conviction is rooted in lived experience rather than policy language, growing up in Eersterust, Tshwane where the automotive sector is part of life. “I never knew what the automotive sector was. I knew that cars were made and that Samcor existed and that quite a number of households in the community had someone employed by the sector; and that drove a respect for the automotive sector, but we didn’t know the extent of the industry,” she remembers.
That early exposure to a sector built on labour, rather than leadership, shaped how she now approaches her role. Her mother, an activist who raised bursary funds for young women in the community every Women’s Month, taught her a lesson that has stayed with her. “Irrespective of the title you hold, you should be able to make a meaningful impact on the lives of others. Without that, the title is meaningless.”
TABLE FOR ALL
Building inclusive, transformed, and forward-thinking teams is a principle that Van Eck has followed through her two decades in government, including a period leading the response to South Africa’s informal settlement crisis during the Covid 19 pandemic, when she found herself as one of only two women in a room otherwise filled with government personnel, engineers, and town planners. “I looked at the group, but I saw just one other woman at the table. All the other women present were secretaries taking notes,” she says.
That experience crystallised her approach to leadership in male-dominated industries, automotive included. “Women face triple oppression – classified and oppressed because of race, class and gender. They are further economically excluded. 30+ years later very little progress has been registered.”
“I am passionate about the inclusion of women in senior management, and I will not preach to the OEMs but not make a difference in the organisation itself,” she says. The organisation’s board has made the issue a formal priority, running alongside its industrial mandate.
Transformation, in the AIDC’s framing, is inseparable from localisation, and the numbers show why the organisation is pushing hard on both fronts at once. Component manufacturing remains a weak point in South Africa’s supply chain, with local content levels having slipped rather than grown. “We are busy with consultations where we aim to, by 2035, have inclusion of 60% local production of components. This is a very ambitious target, but it is something that we think can be achieved. We have regressed over the years, sitting at around 40% for the past two years, and now at 38%,” Van Eck explains. Reversing that slide, she believes, depends on opening the value chain to entrepreneurs who have historically been locked out of it, particularly women moving into technical and ownership roles rather than administrative ones.
One example she points to is a woman-led business now manufacturing batteries for electric vehicle charging stations, a sign of where the industry’s next growth phase is expected to come from. The AIDC has also supported a women’s formation focused on setting targets for woman-owned manufacturing businesses in the auto component space, supported by contributions from OEMs through the Automotive Industry Transformation Fund. “We want to bring more women into that space, we want engineers to be able to grow into that space, and that is the foundation for the formation.”
SKILLS FOR TOMORROW
Skills development sits at the centre of the AIDC’s transformation strategy, particularly as automation, robotics and new energy vehicle technology reshape what factory-floor work actually requires. The organisation has repositioned and relaunched the Gauteng Automotive Learning Centre to widen course accreditation and aligning training with where the sector is heading, a response as much to global competitive pressure as to domestic skills gaps.
“Globally, this industry has taken a knock in the sense that the entry of China in various markets has stirred a big debate about the way forward. We primarily produce German cars for export, but Chinese brands have entered the market with competitive pricing and advanced technology, changing the competitive landscape,” says Van Eck.
Naamsa has described the rise of Chinese brands in South Africa as a structural reset rather than a passing trend, driven by technology-rich, competitively priced vehicles rather than short-term discounting. FNB and WesBank economists have argued that the response cannot simply be defensive. Tariffs alone risk protecting the industry’s past structure at the expense of its future competitiveness. Electric vehicle sales in South Africa, though still a small share of the market, doubled in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, and government has introduced a 150% tax deduction for qualifying investment in EV’s and hydrogen vehicle production from March 2026, a signal that the policy environment is beginning to catch up with the shift already under way on dealer floors.
Van Eck sees an opportunity in how other markets have positioned themselves. “We are looking at how Morocco has been able to export slightly more into European markets and we believe it is because of the advantage they have thanks to opening up much quicker to electric vehicles.” South Africa, she says, is still defining its own policy position on new energy vehicles, even as it works to de-risk against tariff disruption in key export markets including the United States and Europe.
Change of ownership at one of Gauteng’s most established plants illustrates how quickly the competitive landscape is moving. “We have opened the Chery plant recently, and that played a significant role with them being anchored in Gauteng but able to export under the free trade agreements to the rest of the continent,” Van Eck notes, pointing to the African Continental Free Trade Area as an avenue the AIDC is actively working to exploit for new entrants and local suppliers alike.
PROJECTS IN MOTION
Three projects capture where the AIDC’s ambitions are heading next. In July, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi officially launched the Manufacturing Centre of Excellence at the Automotive Supplier Park in Rosslyn, the relaunched and expanded successor to the Gauteng Automotive Learning Centre. Training now covers automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, mechatronics and new energy vehicle technologies, building on more than a decade of work that has already trained over 24,631 learners.
Beyond the factory gates, the AIDC’s Township Automotive Hubs are extending formal support to informal mechanics and entrepreneurs in Winterveld and Krugersdorp, refurbishing government buildings into fully equipped workshops offering structural repairs, spray painting, tyre and wheel services and more. “Township Hubs are all about the impact,” says Van Eck, with further sites planned as the programme expands.
At the Automotive Supplier Park itself, home to component manufacturers supplying BMW, Ford and Nissan across 60 hectares, the AIDC is preparing to open up a further 100 hectares in partnership with private investors. “We are developing additional land in partnership with the private sector that will enable further investment into South Africa in the automotive space. Whether that is battery manufacturing, making seats, or providing paints – we want to create a conducive environment through infrastructure development.”
For Van Eck, all of it points back to the same long-term measure of success. “The meaningful impact we have on people’s lives is the true measure of success. We are here to make change and must always continue to make an impact.”