The JAC T8 EV Is The First Electric Double Cab Pickup Commercially Available In Kenya
New car sales in a lot of African countries don’t tell the full story. That’s because in most of these countries, 95% of all new registrations are used vehicles, mostly 8 years old, or older vehicles imported from Asia, Europe, and North America. The result is sales of brand new vehicles tend to be not more than 10,000 units per year per country in quite a number of markets. This excludes the larger markets like South Africa, where hundreds of thousands of brand new vehicles are sold per year.
Despite the seemingly low brand new vehicle sales in some of these countries, one vehicle segment that really stands out in a lot of them is the pickup segment. Sales of pickups tend to take up over 50% of the new vehicle sales market when you combine both single cab and double cab pickups. Brand new pickups are usually bought by fleet operators, including utility companies, governments, mining firms, agricultural enterprises, and people in the electrical, plumbing, construction, and general trades industries. Some of the most popular pickups include the internal combustion engine Toyota Hilux, Isuzu D-Max, and the Nissan NP300.
A lot of the use case of these pickups involve work around campuses (large farms, mines, etc.) where electric pickups could slot into some of these operations and be seamlessly supported by onsite vehicle charging. This is why I was excited to see that we are now starting to see more electric pickups being offered in some African markets. The latest one is the JAC T8 EV that has been available to for people to buy in Kenya for awhile now. The vehicle is distributed in Kenya by ECTA Kenya LTD.
Here is a summary of the specs of the JAC T8 EV Pickup on sale in Kenya:
With an estimated range of 330 km, this truck could be quite useful for traditional pickup users. The good thing is that there is also a growing charging network in Kenya from the likes of EvChaja, and therefore soon EV drivers will be able to drive to most of the major centers in Kenya quite comfortably.
The addition of all electric double cap pickups to the Kenyan market is a great development. Reports from Kenya say the JAC T8 EV pickup has been well received. KenGen, Kenya’s largest electricity generation company, has also taken delivery of some of these electric pickups. Here is a video review from Kenya giving us an up close view of JAC T8 EV. It’s good to see one of the key vehicle segments on the African continent starting to get some electric options.
Image courtesy of JAC Motors, ECTA Kenya
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