Who is driving all these extra cars? Do the math

The tremendous growth of Kenya’s vehicle population can be measured in numbers.

We can readily see the cause (in very low-priced used imports) and the consequences (in traffic), and in related vehicle and business trends. Consumers, suppliers, policy makers and administrators have a pretty clear grasp of those changes.

But the biggest change of all might not be about vehicles, business, prices, age, sources, quality or even such a leap in quantity.  Perhaps the most profound change — which is scarcely addressed — is in “who” is driving all these additional vehicles.

 If you increase a national vehicle population from 250,000 to 1,250,000 you don’t just have a lot more vehicles. You have a five-fold increase in motorists — the great majority of whom are “first time” owners. In the space of one generation!

The last time that happened so quickly, and on such a scale, was nearly 100 years ago, thanks to a World War (which put millions of blue collars in uniform — and in the driving seat for the first time) and the invention of mass production, which overnight transmogrified the cost of car ownership from an elitist option that only the very rich could contemplate, to a realistic aspiration and possibility for the general populace.

Sure, that led to an explosion in numbers, and much else in socio-economics and technology. Since then, over much of the world, having a car in the driveway has become as universal as having a front door on your house.  

Vehicle populations have increased largely in line with people populations (and affluence, not artificial subsidies), and by the time first-time owners come of age they have served a lifelong “motoring culture” apprenticeship in the back seat of the family car.   

All the systems that design, market, service and administrate motoring are based on that assumption.

Now that Kenya has a critical mass of car owning families, in future generations most of our new car owners coming on stream will fit that pattern. But today that assumption is not warranted. A great many of our car users, perhaps even the  majority,  are not just first time owners. They are first time motorists.

Does this not beg a question for those designing marketing messages, servicing systems and public education campaigns?  Even those making policy and administrating roads and traffic (in an utumishi kwa wote spirit)?

Are the perceptions, needs, wishes and practical priorities of multi-generational car owners exactly the same as those just arriving in the motoring world?  

There will be some common denominators, but surely some profound differences, too.

And if there is a difference, what have those who sell and service vehicles changed to address the problem — and the opportunity?

We have a completely new socio-economic cadre of car owners. Demographically, it is by far the largest segment. What is business, that wants their custom, doing to innovatively assist — and thereby capture — their motoring debut and experience?

Perhaps we should ask the advice of those who have set up our mobile phone systems, who seem to have an astonishingly effective vision and strategy for exponential growth of a traditional service (the telephone) in an exploding new market. Our motor business needs an automotive equivalent of M-Pesa.