Lessons from Asia for East Africa car makers

The respective vehicle industries of Uganda and Kenya are still very young.

The motor vehicle is 130 years old: Mobius has been in existence for less than 10 of those while we only heard of the Kiira EV in 2015 and the Kayoola Solar Bus in 2016. This makes them infants, relatively speaking, and the silver lining in this is fairly obvious: That the industries in these two countries are blank slates on which we can chart our automotive and financial futures.

READ: Kiira and Mobius: A long way to go

This, I believe, is how it can be done:

The Ugandans would do well to speed up the process a little and at least get a vehicle into production and on sale. There is no better incentive and guide than customer feedback, and this would prevent needless money spent heading in the wrong direction under the guise of “development.” There is only so much time that can be spent being a visionary.

That being said, the business plan as presented by one Albert Akovuku, COO at the Kiira Electric Vehicle Project, seems pretty solid. The company needs an additional $350 million to set up a factory and begin production by 2018. Investors are being sought aggressively worldwide based on a promise of returns within a decade after capturing 15 per cent of the market.

Mobius Motors needs to borrow a leaf from the Kiira Project. Hiding one’s light under a bushel will not lead anywhere meaningful, least of all in the world of today where the cutthroat competition calls for the ruthless and shameless self-promotion typified by hip-hop artistes if one wants to get ahead. The corporate world is even less forgiving. Mobius’s operations have been shadowy at best and downright secretive at times; which is hurting it.

It doesn’t end at just revamping the modus operandi of the aforementioned auto-builders. There is an urgent need to involve the government, and not necessarily for investment, subsidises or grants. Policy adjustment will be a much better force at generating income than outright cash handouts.

If the respective industries are to grow, they will only do so by shifting metal and not by leeching off their countries’ coffers for survival. There is only so far that a government bailout can take a car company before the company becomes a national liability rather than a source of national pride. We all saw that during the recent economic recession in the United States.

How do we get these numbers? The solution may prove to be deeply unpopular but should be extremely effective. How did the Asian Tigers get to where they are now in such a short time? How, particularly, did Hyundai and KIA motors move from being makers of substandard versions/copies of obsolete Japanese models 20 years ago to selling cars that today, in terms of quality, are at par with or in some cases slightly ahead of the self-same Japanese brands they copied to get themselves started?

Kill the grey import market, is the answer. It won’t be necessary to ban imports altogether; but import tariffs could be prohibitive enough to make one reconsider importing a Toyota Mark X or some other Japanese domestic market car.

However, the rapidly expanding middle class means they need an alternative if they cannot import a Mark X and this is where Kiira, Kayoola and Mobius come in. They have to fill the gap; and not just with numbers but also in quality.

Draft business plan

The following is just a rough draft of a business plan, but it should benefit a lot of people:

For starters, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead of incurring huge costs now on research and development before even going to market, how about spending this money buying the rights and factory tooling to a popular car model that has been, say, about 10 years out of production?

Some car models were extremely effective and sold in huge numbers. Cars such as the Toyota Corolla 100 and 110, the Datsun pick-up, the Volkswagen Golf, Isuzu N Series, Nissan E24 etc. These could be rebadged as Mobius/Kiira/Kayoola since they are no longer being made by their respective manufacturers. The buyers would be getting quality (or as close to quality as the quality control measures will allow) while building their country in the process.

Proceeds from sales can then be channelled to paying for the rights and factory tooling for the cars from Japan, expansion of production facilities and most importantly, into research and development for a new car from the ground up.

The difference with the R&D this time round is that a) there is a bottomless pool of money to draw from owing to profits from sales and b) there is nothing like exposure to global auto-building leaders’ technological know-how to inspire and guide local engineers in the direction in which to think. Just the same way disassembling an engine opens up a whole new world of understanding to a novice mechanic, building a class-leading car, no matter how obsolete, bit by bit will give ideas on what to do or how to go about it. That is how the Koreans did it, and that, I believe, is how we can do it too.

There is also a third way. Sales volume may be a distant pipe dream for a purely (East) African car, but if we really do want to have an industry we can call our own — be it jointly as East Africa or individually as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania — and we want to make cars solely based on our own thinking, what is wrong with making specialist vehicles? These sell in low numbers but they are so highly specialised and specific in their purposes that nobody else will bother making them.

Russia has a plethora of these for Arctic and Siberian exploration. South Africa has the mine-resistant RG-31 Nyala military vehicle, and the Mamba APC which works very well for both wartime and anti-riot troop mobility.

Since the Mobius has been quietly marketed as the farmer’s friend, how about specialising it even further to the point it can be exported worldwide because it is the only vehicle that serves that particular function?

Summary

To set a milestone, in the motoring industry does not necessarily call for a dramatic paradigm shift in existing frameworks. It may not even be necessary to set a milestone at all.

This write-up is again in reference mostly to the Kenyan-made Mobius: it has been roundly outclassed from all directions. Joe Jackson of Mobius and the Makerere students are not setting new production standards like Henry Ford did with the Model T, they are not introducing new technology like Elon Musk did with his Tesla cars; and, admittedly, the Mobius II and the Kiira-Kayoola hybrid-electric pair are not going to conquer any major markets any time soon like the Toyota Hilux and Prius did (let us be honest with ourselves, they just aren’t); unless, of course, we go the South East Asian way and make importation of motor vehicles prohibitively difficult if not downright impossible, effectively forcing everyone to either buy a locally built product or walk.

Some of the techniques necessary to push sales or justify production may seem a little underhanded (plagiarism) and/or unfair (punitive import tariffs on foreign cars), but look where it got Hyundai and KIA. Barking right at the heels of Toyota, Renault and the like.

What other African countries have done

To The South

Tanzania has come up with a vehicle too, though they decided to go the commercial way and not spend too much effort coming up with their own thing.

What they have is a truck line called the Nyumbu. The Ministry of Defence and National Service apparently “developed” a truck (they clearly didn’t) and the result is an Ashok Leyland Stallion/G-90/U Truck/e-Comet (they all look the same), which in itself was a derivative from IVECO (Fiat) or British Leyland.

All they did was change the headlamps from single squares to double round, then changed the name from “Ashok Leyland” to “Nyumbu.” Lower down the hierarchy is another Nyumbu, one of the ugliest vehicles I have ever seen. It is hard to describe without sounding nasty, but if it was painted a dull green and sent back in time to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, it wouldn’t be out of place.

Their final entry in this list is a tractor, which is very basic, and is also called a Nyumbu. Sadly, the website I visited did not distinguish these vehicles properly by model.

Kantaka

A Ghanaian apostle is behind this brand. Not only has he built cars, he also has some aeronautic prototypes in the pipeline. The latest display was a military vehicle, but the seriousness behind it is in question.

The Katanka line is publicised by two vehicles, which may or may not be their entire model range. One of them is an SUV of indeterminate size. The photos on the company’s website must have been carefully chosen because they all lack reference points from which to deduce the actual size of the car.

Given the design characteristics, I’d say it lies somewhere between an X-Trail and a Landcruiser Prado, with the bias being on the Prado end of the scale. It has a whiff of Prado J150 about its countenance; what with the toothy grin and slightly off-square headlamps, but it also has the very square corners around the bonnet leading edge and fender tops which typify the Nissan X-Trail. From the A pillar rearwards, it starts to look a little like an Isuzu Wizard. There are roof rails to complete the SUV-ness of it all.

It may sound like a mess, but it actually isn’t. The whole car somehow seems to gel together in an inoffensive manner, which is saying a lot. There is no word on engines, suspension or transmissions, but expect something generic, possibly crate-borne from General Motors or Japan.

Spec levels also fall into the realms of the unknown for now, but judging from external cues — mirror-mounted repeater lamps, roof rails, alloy rims, fat tyres, colour coded bumpers and mirrors, fog lamps, rubbing strips and side-steps — I’d say the specification inside must be generous too, more so for whatever price range they must be going for.

They can’t be that expensive. Oddly enough, I did not see sun-roofs in any of the photos, and yet as a trend, a large number of cars sold in West Africa come with sun-roofs. Maybe it is an optional extra. There is also a double-cab pick-up, which is clearly an Isuzu DMAX or was until it got the Kantanka logo pasted on.

Innoson

You can never leave Nigeria out of any action that goes down in West Africa, and they throw their hat in the ring with the Innoson. While Kantanka’s cars are expected to hit the streets sometime this month (pending approval from their equivalent of the bureau of standards), Innoson already has units on sale, and they have the widest range of cars, also the most Chinese-looking.

Their fanciest filly is an SUV, which, oddly enough, only appeared in black in photos (and there were dozens of them). Maybe there are other colours available, maybe there aren’t. Car manufacturers have been known to reach some strange boardroom decisions. It looks like what the Toyota Fortuner should look like.

The overall appearance is even better resolved than the Kantanka, and one would be forgiven for assuming that it is something from across the ocean, not locally manufactured. I especially liked the rear: it wears that chunky and butch SUV uniform of roof spoiler, vertical tailgate, large lamps, fat bumpers complete with integrated reflectors and rear screen wiper with considerable aplomb, but admittedly it also comes off as being a bit too clichéd.

In a parking lot game of Spot-That-Rear, expect any of these answers: Jeep Grand Cherokee, Toyota Fortuner, Chevrolet Trailblazer or some Ford Something-or-Other. Yes, it looks like all these.

The interior smacks of General Motors too. Dual tone plastics (the two tones being black and a lighter shade of black), buttons festooned all over the centre console, several cubbyholes and a thick-rimmed, three-spoke steering wheel, which also seems borrowed from the new DMAX.

The Nigerian Road Safety Corps, among other clients, get a double-cab iteration of the Innoson, and well, it is a Grand Tiger (Chinese double-cab), like the ones in use by the Kenya Police. The resemblance is uncanny.

Rounding up the lineup is the IVM Fox, the only car identified by name. It looks like yet another Chinese copy of a European econo-box from the late 1990s or early 2000s, a Ford Fiesta/Citroen Saxo kind of thing; or maybe a KIA. Nowadays Korean cars are barely distinguishable from their European rivals.