In this incisive and timely book, Alex M Mashilo - an experienced automotive technician and trade-union stalwart - dissects the intersection of global geopolitics, industrial policy, economic upgrading, and the contested just transition in South Africa's automotive sector. Economic upgrading, orchestrated by multinational corporations from the Global North, relentlessly optimises profit through process innovation and market capture inside global production networks. Social upgrading - improving workers' wages, conditions, and lives - does not automatically follow. Mashilo demonstrates that without strategic action, economic gains remain captured by capital while workers and communities bear the costs of restructuring and decarbonisation. Caught in Neutral exposes the incoherence of South African industrial policy, showing how policy vacillation has undermined a worker-centred just transition. Yet it also identifies a strategic opening: transport as the critical terrain on which organised labour and the climate movement can forge a common, transformative agenda.

Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo is Visiting Researcher in the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.