A buyer sat across my desk recently, deposit ready and already picturing herself driving her new car home. Then she paused and asked a question that, in my view, every customer should feel comfortable asking: “Can you please explain this agreement to me?”
In front of her was a Guaranteed Future Value structure. She understood the instalment, but wanted clarity on what the GFV meant, what would happen when the agreement reached its end, and what options would be available to her depending on her circumstances at that point. There was nothing unusual about her questions. In fact, they were the right questions. Buying a car is exciting, but understanding how you are financing it is just as important as choosing the car itself.
That norm is now colliding with a tougher financing environment. TransUnion’s Q1 2026 South Africa Industry Insights Report, released in June, found the vehicle asset finance market resilient but increasingly strained, momentum has shifted toward financing new vehicles rather than used ones, even as lenders report rising exposure to higher-risk borrowers and larger loan sizes. Buyers are not walking away from car finance. They are walking deeper into it, on bigger numbers, with less room for error.
I have spent my career as a Finance and Insurance Business Manager in the automotive industry, on the exact spot where that error gets made, the desk where excitement about a car meets the fine print of how it’s paid for. The National Credit Act caps a vehicle instalment at 25% of gross income and total debt at 36%, but a compliant deal can still be a badly understood one. Legality and clarity are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where South African buyers keep losing money.
That gap is why, this October, I’m launching my first book: a practical, plain-language guide to vehicle finance, built from years of watching buyers sign first and understand later. It unpacks instalment sale versus lease, what a balloon payment really costs over time, when a GFV (Guaranteed Future Value) structure serves the buyer rather than the bank, and the questions every buyer should ask before, not after, they sign.
I have argued this case in public before, unpacking the “car finance maze” for Daily Maverick earlier this year, and the response told me the appetite is real. Buyers do not want to be sold to or spoken down to. They want someone inside the industry willing to explain it plainly.
As both a practitioner still active on the floor and now an author, I think the industry has a choice to make. It can keep treating disclosure as a box to tick in the minutes before signature, or it can start treating financial literacy as part of the product. Consultants and finance houses that get ahead of this; that build explanation into the sale rather than around it, will earn the trust this market is currently short of.
It feels fitting that this book’s pre-announcement is arriving in Heritage Month. That trust is not only a market metric, but also generational. We are quick to celebrate the traditions, languages and stories our families hand down, but rarely talk about the financial habits and blind spots passed on just as directly. A finance agreement no one understood should not be part of anyone’s legacy.
The book launches in October, and I will be sharing more detail including launch date, city and how to get a copy in the weeks ahead. But the message driving it will not change: South African car buyers are financially capable. What they have lacked is an industry willing to meet them with a straight answer.
Written by Vanice Ntuli, Author, Consultant and F&I Business Manager