A 30-year, R50-billion concept project hopes to establish Rosslyn, Gauteng’s vehicle assembly hub, as a special economic zone, said Automotive Industry Development Centre (AIDC) CEO Barlow Manilal on Monday, speaking at an Indian component makers conference, held in Tshwane.

The project name for the development is Tshwane Auto City.

The AIDC is a Gauteng Growth and Development Agency subsidiary and is the organisation that would implement the project.

Manilal told Engineering News earlier this month that the aim of the public–private Auto City project is to achieve economies of scale, luring more original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs, or vehicle makers) to Rosslyn, while also enabling an improved business environment for those OEMs already there, by, for example, providing a more efficient logistics network.

“Tshwane Auto City will be the biggest multi-OEM development region in the country. This project is ambitious, but with the vision and support of the City of Tshwane as a principal driver of the concept, it is achievable,” said Manilal.

OEMs already active in Rosslyn are BMW South Africa (SA), Nissan SA, Tata Trucks and UD Trucks, as well as a number of local component suppliers, with a large percentage of these housed in the Automotive Supplier Park, a dedicated component supplier park, near the Nissan plant.

BMW SA and Nissan SA are the volume players on this list, exporting their vehicles globally. BMW SA has already upped production on the back of the January 2013 introduction of government’s Automotive Production and Development Programme (APDP), which rewards volume assembly, while Nissan SA is gearing up to do the same.

Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa is also housed in the Tshwane region, with its export plant located on the other side of the city, however, in Silverton.

Other vehicle production nodes in South Africa are Durban (Toyota), East London (Mercedes-Benz), Uitenhage (Volkswagen) and Port Elizabeth (General Motors).

Manilal said the APDP and a concept called ‘Vision 2020’ are the driving factors for the AIDC when planning Rosslyn’s future expansion.

This incentive programme hopes to enable the production of 1.2-million vehicles in South Africa by 2020. Production volumes reached around 550 000 vehicles in 2012, and are expected to rise to about 650 000 units in 2013.

When compared to global standards, South Africa’s infrastructure is already under stress from current production numbers, noted Manilal. Increasing production means that more and more vehicles will have to be transported by rail, handled by ports and ferried to dealers. Much greater intra-Africa trade is also anticipated on the back of the Africa Free Trade Area, which is due for full implementation around 2017.

Further increasing capacity at plants also spells the arrival of new component suppliers in South Africa, and they will also need to move their products on roads and through harbours and airports.

“And they will need power and water,” adds Manilal.

“We considered that Tshwane is the place where the biggest concentration of auto makers in the country resides, and then thought about how we could augment the infrastructure that already existed to cater for the APDP and beyond, and conceptualised the Tshwane Auto City project.”