Somewhere in South Africa today, a family will get a phone call no one wants to receive. More than 12,000 people die on our roads every single year on the N3, on rural district roads, in taxis, on the way to school. We have grown so used to these numbers that they barely make the news anymore unless the crash is especially large. But here is something most South Africans don’t know: some of the most advanced life-saving vehicle technology in the world was invented right here, in South Africa, decades ago. We have simply never brought it home to our own roads.
As a researcher at the CSIR, I work on the engineering that keeps soldiers alive in the most dangerous conditions imaginable. It might sound like a strange place to start a conversation about your daily commute. But the two are more connected than you would think.
In the 1970s and 80s, South African engineers designed a military vehicle called the Casspir, built to protect soldiers from landmines. Its signature feature was a V-shaped hull that deflects the force of an explosion away and around the vehicle, instead of straight up into the people inside. More than 2,000 Casspirs were built, and the design proved so effective that it went on to shape the international standard for what today’s armies call MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), used by defence forces around the world. South Africa didn’t just take part in that story. We started it.
Here is the point that matters for ordinary road users: the same engineering principles that protect a soldier’s spine and organs from the violent force of a blast are directly relevant to what happens to a human body in a serious car crash. Blast-deflection, impact absorption, occupant protection under extreme force. This is exactly the science that determines whether a person walks away from a collision or does not. We built this expertise. We proved it works. And it has never been deliberately carried across into the design standards, the taxis, the buses, or the safety regulations that shape the vehicles most South Africans actually use.
This isn’t only about crash survival. It’s about the bigger picture of a transport system many of us experience as unreliable and unsafe, potholed roads, ageing infrastructure, overloaded scholar transport, a rising cost of moving people and goods around the country. Transport also accounts for roughly one-tenth of South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions, so decisions we make about how we build and power our vehicles matter for the climate too, not just for road safety.
I raised this argument in my opening address at the 44th Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2026), held from 6 to 9 July at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria, the country’s largest annual gathering of transport engineers, researchers, and government policymakers. This year’s conference fell on a meaningful anniversary: 30 years of transport policy in our democracy. Three decades is long enough to take an honest look at what worked, and what we missed. One of the clearest things we missed is this: we let a genuinely world-class, homegrown safety innovation sit inside our defence sector instead of asking how it could save lives on our highways.
Fixing this is not about inventing something new. It is about political and institutional will, getting the CSIR, Armscor, Denel, the Department of Transport, and vehicle manufacturers into the same room, with a shared mandate to move proven safety technology from the battlefield into civilian design standards. I’ve proposed a practical framework for exactly this, built around five priorities: sovereignty, safety, security, sustainability, and resilience, with concrete actions over the next three years and the decade beyond.
South Africans deserve a transport system that doesn’t quietly accept 12,000 deaths a year as the cost of getting to work. We are not short of expertise. We are short of the bridge connecting what we already know how to build to the roads South Africans travel on every single day. That bridge is buildable. The only question is whether we choose to build it.
- Dr Dithoto Modungwa, Defence and Security Researcher at CSIR
