21/04/2026
Why South Africa's Hottest-Selling Chinese Vehicles Keep Reaching for a 1.5-Litre Engine
Walk into any dealership selling Chinese cars in South Africa right now - and there are rather a lot of them - and you'll notice something peculiar.
The BYD Shark 6: 1.5-litre turbo. The Changan UNI-S: 1.5-litre turbo. The Haval Jolion: 1.5-litre turbo. The Chery Tiggo 4 Pro: 1.5-litre. The Omoda C5: 1.5-litre. The Jaecoo J7: also, rather inevitably, a 1.5-litre. It's as if Beijing issued a memo: thou shalt not exceed 1,499cc. They haven't, technically. But the result is remarkably similar.
So why this specific, seemingly arbitrary engine displacement? The answer, delightfully, involves accountants more than engineers.
South Africa levies a 25% import duty on all light passenger vehicles, which is already enough to make your eyes water over your morning coffee. But sitting on top of that is an ad valorem excise duty - essentially a luxury tax - that escalates sharply with the vehicle's retail price. This tax is calculated using the formula: {(0.00003 × A) – 0.75}%, where "A" is the recommended retail price less 20%.
In plain English: the more expensive the car, the more savage the tax bill. The R250,000 threshold above which this luxury tax kicks in hasn't been adjusted for inflation, meaning even relatively modest family cars now attract it. SARS, it seems, has decided that a Chery Tiggo is basically a Bentley.
The implication is elegant in its simplicity. Keep the car affordable - under R500,000, ideally - and you dramatically reduce the ad valorem burden on the buyer. The most reliable way to keep a car affordable is to fit it with an engine that doesn't cost a fortune to produce. Enter the 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder: the automotive equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Small, efficient, surprisingly capable, and extraordinarily cheap to manufacture at scale.
Here's where it gets interesting. Chinese manufacturers haven't stumbled onto the 1.5T formula by accident - they've industrialized it with the kind of cold, systematic efficiency that should make European boardrooms deeply uncomfortable. Between 2010 and 2022, the Chinese central government spent over 152 billion yuan (approximately R380 billion) in subsidies supporting the broader automotive and new energy vehicle sector.
While much of that investment targeted electric vehicles, the knock-on effect was a manufacturing ecosystem of terrifying efficiency - factories producing engines, transmissions, and entire vehicles at costs that Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai simply cannot match while keeping the lights on in Stuttgart or Ulsan.
The result is predictably spectacular. For around R400,000, South Africans could suddenly own a car loaded with leather seats, a large touchscreen, ambient lighting, a sunroof, and a suite of safety features including lane-keep assist and 360-degree cameras - things previously reserved for cars costing twice as much. The 1.5-litre engine isn't a compromise. It's the financial weapon that makes the entire value proposition work.
To be fair to the engineers, a modern turbocharged 1.5-litre is genuinely decent. The Haval Jolion Pro pushes 105kW and 210Nm through its unit - figures that would have seemed entirely respectable from a 2.0-litre naturally aspirated engine a decade ago. The Omoda C5 extracts 115kW from the same basic recipe. Chery even deploys the 1.5-litre platform as the backbone of a plug-in hybrid system producing a combined 165kW and 310Nm. The little engine that could, apparently, can quite a lot when you bolt a turbocharger to it and tell it to get on with things.
There's another fiscal bonus hidden in that small displacement. South Africa levies a CO₂ emissions tax on new vehicles, currently sitting at R146 per gram per kilometre above the threshold. A small turbocharged engine, by its nature, tends to produce fewer emissions than a larger naturally aspirated unit turning out similar power. The 1.5T therefore serves double fiscal duty: reducing the purchase price and trimming the emissions penalty simultaneously. Two birds, one very small, very efficient stone.
The proliferation of 1.5-litre engines in Chinese vehicles isn't some grand engineering philosophy born in a wind tunnel. It's the product of brutally rational economics: a cheap-to-build engine, fitted to a cheap-to-manufacture car, priced to minimize South Africa's punishing import duties and escalating luxury tax, and backed by a government that spent years subsidizing the entire supply chain into terrifying competitiveness. Chery alone grew by 1,435% in South African sales between 2023 and 2024.
The Chinese didn't reinvent the car. They just did the maths. And the maths, as it turns out, always leads to 1.5 litres.
