This recently-turned-sixty sovereign state we call home boasts of an automotive industry like none other, based purely on one thing: the sheer peculiarity of it.
You will find more outstanding trends elsewhere (hello Asia), and you will find more variety as well (hello America). You will even find more daring (hello South America) and more class (hello Europe) and more resilience (hello Australia), but the former Imperial British East Africa Company does one thing better than anyone else, and that is bucking the trend.
The local automotive industry is one driven by fads like any other. When people got into the 7A-powered Toyota Corona Premio, everyone and their grandmother followed suit; festooning the streets with trains composed of the exact same vehicle shaded in different hues from a single three-colour palette. Black Prados followed. Now we have red Mazda CX5s. There is a set of aftermarket rims that adorns everything from Mazda Demios to Toyota Voxys, but is most commonly found on Subarus. Every third rumbler has them. Kenyans follow fads religiously.
This group-think is, however, in polar opposition to some innovation that you will spot if you look hard enough. Who needs a Prado when you can go tearing up the clag in a lifted and snorkelled Subaru Forester fitted with outsized mud terrain tyres? Who needs a 25-seater Isuzu bus when your passengers can have the bragging rights of claiming they arrived at their destination in a Mercedes? (a Sprinter, admittedly, but a Benz is a Benz, no?). Why buy a pick-up truck when you can carve up your saloon car from the B-pillar aft?
This innovativeness sometimes leads to misguided single-mindedness in which taste is in battle with practicality and affordability wrestles against fantasy. That is why we have saloon car owners asking about the off-road prowess of a FWD Japanese compact with almost no ground clearance because he visits the village once a year in a county whose number you cannot recite off the top of your head. This saloon car owner probably works in the same building as a man (his boss, perhaps?) who owns a dune-ready Toyota Landcruiser VX that shuttles between his Parklands apartment and his office's Westlands premises. Never mind that this is actually walking distance for some; but even if you were to drive, the VX is embarrassingly overqualified for that short but extremely challenging and treacherous network of relatively smooth tarmac linking the two locations.
A 7A-powered Toyota Corona Premio.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
A member of the Kenyan automotive scene will buy a Bentley Bentayga and ask you about fuel consumption. He will stack a family of six into a four-seater Nissan Note and attempt the 470km haul to his Busia village; but in the city he sits alone in a seven-seat Toyota Alphard, listening to local radio while stuck in traffic. He will petition the government to adjust the importation age limit upwards because he saw a Mitsubishi Diamante that he would love to own, but when car shopping, the WhatsApp treatise he posits to his car-selling peers includes the words "must be KD-something".
If the vehicle is being financed, the financiers will require it to be fairly new. He will crave a Ford F150 Raptor (LHD-only) but his insurance dossier grows thicker every financial year owing to his occasional failure to master the helm of his own RHD car which he drives on roads designed for RHD cars.
They will deride electric and hybrid vehicles but the fuel consumption figures of V8 motors and price of premium unleaded are matters of national and personal concern which they will debate passionately over. They will vilify anyone who cannot operate a manual transmission but carefully guard the secret that in driving school, they enrolled to be trained using an automatic car. This is a land of contrasts and contradictions, but we are Kenyan and Kenya is our business.
The vehicle market where hardware changes hands manifests the oddball nature of our motoring culture best. Flashbacks of Car Clinic remind us that a lot of people would shop for vehicles based on how much they intend to sell it for down the line, not the actual value the vehicle will bring to their lives. This kind of logic applies to car dealers and speculators (flippers), not a man looking to upgrade his family transport from public to private, but who are we? Kenyans.
We have also witnessed sales pitches in which rather than the broker extolling the virtues of his clients' wares to potential punters, he instead focuses on racial and gender profiling of the owners who just simply want to dispose of their wheels. "Lady owner, Asian origin" are two characteristics that have been heavily abused when brokers try to shift metal at the digital forecourt. Never mind that a cursory search of the vehicle details in the TIMS system reveals the vehicle is registered to one James Mwangi Kinyanjui, P. O. Box Nyandarua ...
The buyers on the other hand will make a beeline for the exact same thing the neighbours bought basing his reasoning on if those people bought it, then it must be good. If it isn't that good, well, at least there are spares for it. If there are no spares, there must be some market demand or else why would the neighbours buy it en masse? This, in turn, means they can sell it for close to what they bought it for even after several years of mostly inappropriate usage. Majority of Kenyan motorists lack imagination when it comes to car shopping.
The saddest part is when they shop for number plates rather than vehicles. Thirteen years ago I did an article titled "How to Buy a Used Car", and expressly warned against being too specific when shopping for a car, especially over number plates. There are plenty of vehicles with older registrations that present excellent value for money, with some having the added bonus of actually being nice to drive. I should know, the entire lineup of vehicles I've owned fall squarely into this category. On the other end of the scale we have vehicles with newer registrations that are raggedy and beaten to within an inch of their lives.
A Kenyan car buyer will take one look at a KB- registration car and turn their nose up at it, no matter how well maintained it is. They will then beam gleefully at a KD-registration, the glare from the newness of the number plate blinding them to obviously visible faults; and they will buy this ramshackle and only after several months of financial pain and immobility will it slowly dawn on them that they bought a former Uber taxi or car hire vehicle and the reason it doesn't work properly despite there being no Check Engine Light is because the vehicle is so run down the Check Engine Light itself doesn't work.
It's easy to see why they would fall into this trap. Our vehicle registration system is chronological, and we are a country that likes to show off. A late registration is indicative of a newer (therefore better) vehicle, recently bought, which implies the owner is currently well off. Old registrations are suggestive of the inability to upgrade or modernise; the poor owner clinging to outdated knick knacks because he cannot pony up for twenty first century technology; either that or he went ransacking the bargain bin of overage rejects because the paucity of Kenya shillings in his pocket disallow him from walking into a real dealership. We are a very judgmental lot, and wrongly so.
Getting to know this industry involves both number-crunching and trend observation; but getting to understand it involves keeping a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. To do this, you must investigate the culture and the mindset; you must know how Kenyans think, what they feel and who they will listen to. Any other methodology is a fish out of water.
When people got into the 7A-powered Toyota Corona Premio, everyone and their grandmother followed suit; festooning the streets with trains composed of the exact same vehicle shaded in different hues from a single three-colour palette. Black Prados followed. Now we have red Mazda CX5s.
Photo credit: AFP
The biggest contributing factor to these bizarre tendencies is who they will listen to. We live in an influencer-driven society where Generation Z has declared war on everything the old guard stood for, up to and including but not limited to separating opinion from fact. A youngster will wake up one day and announce himself as an expert on German cars despite not fully understanding how an internal combustion engine works or that ABS is actually a safety feature increases braking distance rather than a performance enhancement that reduces it. Once this underinformed (or willfully ignorant) but highly influential youth gets on social media, thousands of sheep will follow him as they tumble off the Cliff of Ignorance and fall into the Ocean of Realisation and Painful Consequences.
You must understand that as a result of having the wrong opinion leaders, this industry will sometimes operate at odds with anything you may have been exposed to on the international stage or even what seems like straightforward conventional practice. Combine this with the need to prove our well-being to people who don't care and you can see where the unwise decisions as far as vehicle ownership and operation goes is coming from.
This explains why most high capacity passenger vehicles are not really buses but are in reality, lorries dressed in long decorative frocks. R&D in the PSV sector is biased towards gaudy, over-the-top looks designed to generate social media conversation at the expense of efficiency and safety, because "Look at me!!". The same desire for adulatory attention from complete strangers drives purchasing decisions, driving styles and aftermarket modifications because we have started going to the wrong people for automotive counsel; false prophets, if you will.
These self-appointed Prophets of Prop-shafts are aided and abetted by another dangerous characteristic that is actually not uniquely Kenyan, but global; and that is toxic fandom.
Toxic fandom is one of Peterson's monsters and this is how it moves. One person either develops a belief on his own accord or listens to a Prop-shaft Prophet. Oftentimes, this belief is steeped in misinformation or is an outright fallacy, but it is human nature to defend that which it creates and possesses, so correction of this fallacy is a futile exercise — a fool's errand. The mind is capable of incredible gymnastics when presented with uncomfortable truths; and few truths are more uncomfortable than being told you bought the wrong car. No one wants to admit they made a mistake, let alone blew seven figures on a white elephant that is as reliable as a wet matchbox and just as useless.
In this day and age of social media and the internet, there has arisen a phenomenon called cancel culture . The youngsters come across an ideology or tradition that they don't like, they simply "cancel" it. Cancelling is the removal of the relevance thereof, or refusing to acknowledge the existence of something; more often than not replacing it with something more politically correct or populist. The motor vehicle industry is not immune to this phenomenon.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, someone who bought an unreliable or inappropriate/unsuitable vehicle will refuse to own their mistake and will instead try to bend reality to suit his preferences. With the power of cheap internet and a sizeable following, they will become "car reviewers" where they will declare their unreliable car brand to be the best in the world. Any dissenting voices will be met with a torrent of abuse from both the newfangled autojourno and his mass of adoring but clueless fans. This is how a Prop-shaft Prophet is born. A few months down the line, the Prop-shaft Prophet becomes an "authority" and his word is law, disseminated to the great unwashed via poorly worded blog posts and shallow YouTube videos that no self-respecting cinematographer would dare claim involvement in.
The veracity of these manufactured facts is in direct proportion to the loudness with which they are declared, and the volumes are increasing courtesy of "verified" Twitter accounts and "sponsored" Instagram posts. This is why nowadays when a new car is launched, priority test drives are given to influencers who can't tell a trafficator from a trunnion rather than to qualified motoring journalists who will speak uncomfortable truths. This is akin to trusting pharmaceutical research to a street preacher who has never set foot in college.
Unfortunately, some of these Prop-shaft Prophets find their way into a field where disregarding established fact and eschewing common sense becomes quite literally a matter of life and death; and this is in road safety. This country has a very poor road safety record, but hey, it is fine to overtake on a solid yellow in the face of pictorial and video evidence if the line of sight at least 20 metres ahead of the overtaken vehicle is clear. Why? Because we are Gen Z and you are way past your prime, old man, you shouldn't be talking. The vehicle is mine and I will drive it however I want. Spectacularly gruesome consequences await these holders of hubris ...
A Mazda CX-5.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
I bomb atomically. Socrates' philosophies and hypothesis can't define how I'm dropping these mockeries; but are they really mockeries? To understand a culture and an industry, one must tear it down to its empirical form, down to the last minutiae; and then one must proceed to analyse these details one by one based on past history, current situation reports and inspecting the view to the future millennium. One must look at the bad to understand the good, and one must look at the good to know the bad. We have to wear our bright robes of pride but we also have to replace our torn undergarments of misinformation.
Our automotive industry has not always been a morass of loudmouthed insanity and existence of alternate realities; in fact, this is only a fairly recent phenomenon. Once upon a time, we were a nation with an enviable automotive heritage, and we took pride in this heritage. We have developed homegrown motor vehicles with varying levels of success, we have provided the FIA with an administrator, we continued building the Peugeot 504 long after the French had given up on it, we have an outstanding and highly newsworthy public transport ecosystem, and we have a road network that many remember not so fondly but one that has actually improved in leaps and bounds in the past two decades, among many other things. Sixty years is a long time, and over these six decades a lot has happened. I daresay a second renaissance is afoot and the industry is starting to come alive again, in a good way.
The upside is the industry has always been vibrant and there are no signs of letting up despite the current sad state of the economy. We have had a proliferation of amateur motorsports clubs to take up the slack left by the exit of the World Rally Championship from the Safari rally, but guess what? The WRC is back. Vehicle sales are higher than ever; and not just the used imports that we have grown accustomed (or addicted) to; new vehicle sales are generally higher and what's more, a larger proportion of them are locally assembled. You can thank former President Uhuru Kenyatta for this, as a result of his national automotive policy.
I will be shackling the masses with drastic word tactics over the next few weeks: we will look at personalities, we will look at companies, we will look at specific vehicles, we will look at notable events, we will discuss anything and everything that has shaped this industry over the past six decades — be it road safety, the evolution of the Traffic Act, the liberalisation of the economy, the transport industry, or the fact that what used to be called Toyota Kenya and the dealership formerly known as DT Dobie are now operating under the same roof — we will look at it all. The focus will strictly lie in post-colonial history, so do not expect narratives about Galton-Fenzi. That is a bit too far back.
Perhaps by reliving the glory days, we can reinstate our past awesomeness and colour and hopefully shape a more serious future, because there is no denying it: we have had a glorious past. Only after stomping the ground and pounding footprints in the solid rock of history can we then have our triumph, not unlike one of Julius Caesar's. Because we are Kenyan, and Kenya is our business.
