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Since 2015, a Zimbabwean man named Sangulani Maxwell Chikumbutso has been hailed by some on the internet as iconoclastic genius and self-taught inventor who successfully created an electric car that runs perpetually without ever needing a charge. As outlandish and self-evidently incorrect as that assertion is, the journey to the source of that rumor is a fascinating mystery that began with an unsolicited invitation to a media event for a then-unknown company and provides insight into how the viral sausage is made. The Saith Technologies Open Day Event On 20 July 2015, Zimbabwean tech news site Techzim began reporting on a company named Saith Technologies. The outlet said at the time that they had never heard of the company, but that they had been invited to an Open Day in which the company would display their new, locally produced inventions to the media: The event was evidently well publicized, and even garnered a television spot on South Africa’s SABC news channel. All photographic evidence used to support the existence of Chikumbutso’s inventions stem from an evidently choreographed event held over the course of one day in 2015, and the website for Saith Technologies is populated with photos only from that one day. The most important (and dubious) claim relates to what he has dubbed the Greener Power Machine, or GPM, described on Saith's site: Saith claims that the electric car requires no charging by utilizing a combination of regular batteries and a GPM to amplify them as its engine, breaking the laws of physics by producing more energy than is put into the device: The scientific premise behind the purported GPM is similar to actual physics-abiding technology known as radio frequency harvesting. The concept with these devices is that they they convert ambient radio waves, the result of humanity's love affair with technology, that bounce around our planet into enough energy to power extremely low energy devices like smoke detectors or fitness monitors. A 30 September 2015 story from the Telegraph about a company named Freevolt describes the basic idea: The central difference between radio frequency harvesting (which can at present barely power a Fitbit) and Chikumbutso's GPM is that the latter allegedly takes these radio frequencies and somehow amplifies them without extra power merely by exposing them to a trade secreted substance. Evidently, the gathered reporters were not given enough — or any — information to test these outlandish claims. We are not sure how this assertion can be dispelled and we hope at some forum scientist[s] will put the claims to test, TechZim said three days after the event. This open day event apparently served primarily as a way to produce promotional material for Saith Technology, including a sleek video about Chikumbutso and his inspiring and unlikely story of unique genius. Chikumbutso has repeatedly stated that he has been unable to patent his device since perpetual motion machines (which would violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics) are unpatentable. Techzim ceased reporting on Saith Technologies after filing their 24 July 2015 report, evidently unconvinced that the company had much to offer. Techzim editor Leonard Sengere told us that they never had access to Chikumbutso after that event: The 2017 Revival of Maxwell Chikumbutso On 6 June 2017, the web site 263Chat (which apparently is a Zimbabwe-based media outlet), brought Maxwell Chikumbutso back into the news with the following headline: Trump Scoops Top Zimbabwean Inventor Maxwell Chikumbutso. That story, with its odd headline focused on United States President Donald Trump (despite no mention of the president in the story), claimed that Chikumbutso had been given an opportunity to continue his work in California, since nobody in Africa's entrepreneurial communities had taken any interest: While we are unable to confirm any details of this story or discern what role (if any) the United States may have (or would have had) in encouraging Chikumbutso's alleged move, the story adds a number of claims to the mythology of this serial inventor — most notably the alleged source of funding for his work on electric cars and GPMs: Teddy de Almeida is, according to a number of sites, the Angolan-born chief executive officer of an international collection of companies named Bongani Group, as well as a pastor and entrepreneur in South Africa. On the web site for Bongani Trading, a subsidiary of the Bongani Group for which he is described as CEO, his biography states: We have reached out to de Almeida as well as executive chairman and alleged co-financier of Saith Technologies Luis Caupenela to ask if they did, indeed, provide any funding to Chikumbutso or Saith Technologies, but have not received a response from either individual. Cryptically, a 28 September 2016 Facebook post on an account owned by de Almeida makes only one passing reference to Saith Technology's alleged work in California: The Bongani Trading website that lists Caupenela and de Almeida as executives has not been updated since 2014, and includes several unfinished pages meant to be templates for news stories, suggesting that perhaps the site may not be as official as it appears, or, alternately, that their purported investment yielded no actual news. It is also worth noting that 263chat's website has a disclaimer making it clear that truth is not necessarily the goal of their work: we make no representations [...] of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose, the page reads. Regardless, the story originally published on 263Chat has been cloned repeatedly by countless other extremely dubious web sites, including the Zambian Observer — a site that has trafficked in fake news in the past and which may have no actual connection to the country of Zambia. All of these stories rely on the claims and photographs made during one July 2015 open day event. Despite being published two years later, these accounts offer no new evidence of Chikumbutso's claims and contain no new information that could be used to verify said claims. The 2018 Revival of Maxwell Chikumbutso On 25 April 2018, the conspiracy oriented, reality-adjacent website Collective Evolution picked up the story once again, this time citing the aforementioned Zambian Observer story and the 2015 video of that same event from South African television. As is often the case with Collective Evolution articles, the claims made there have been cloned and regurgitated ad infinitum by other dubious clickbait sites. Despite now being years removed from the only demonstration of this alleged technology, their article (like all the rest) presents no new information that provides any reason to take Chikumbutso's claims — which, again, violate the fundamental laws of physics — seriously. Instead, Collective Evolution argued that Chikumbutso may be at risk now that the United States government is involved, although how it is involved it does not say: Was it always a scam, perhaps designed to elicit donations? It's possible, and the Saith Technologies website does have a donation section. Perhaps later web sites realized that this self-made genius story was clickbait gold and continued running with it for that reason. It's also entirely possible that investors, and perhaps even Chikumbutso himself, fully believed in the technology they attempted to demonstrate in June 2015 — but the fact that no more demonstrations have occurred makes it clear something was, or is, off. It strains credulity to think that a car that runs indefinitely without recharging or fuel would not receive widespread financial support. We have attempted to contact Saith Technologies, but have not yet received a response. In our view, however, the burden of proof for upending the first and second laws of thermodynamics lies squarely on the person making that claim. No proof has been offered in the three years since the claim was first made, and as such we confidently rate the claim that he invented a car that never needs charging as false.
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