Tag: IsuzuD-Max

The bitter-sweet relationship a first car owner has to endure

Posted on by Kibaki Muthamia

Everyone has a teary story about their first car.

He’ll often tell it with a longing in his voice, a soulful lull on his lips and a far-off gaze in his eyes. This is a relationship smelt and blended in metal, full of heart breaks and God’s mercy.

First cars are the true personification of selfless sacrifice.

Someone will frequent a yard sale, and fall in love with a piece of mid 70’s junk. At this stage, budget is always breadline – a fruitful end to months of savings. To say a lifetime of skipping fun with friends for extra jobs to earn some coins doesn’t give it enough credence.

The resuscitating mechanic is usually a cousin working pro bono, or an indefatigable uncle who somehow believes in your dreams. By God’s grace, the car will start running.

You park it outside your bedroom window, and you spend half the night staring at it in the half-light. The first task in the morning is the day-long wash and scrub.

You possess used tires at a bargain from the neighborhood garage for a start. It’s time to roll.

It’s heavenly, picking up a couple of friends for a drive, to the soccer game. The look on their faces are priceless, especially since some are a year or two older. The girls start to take notice of the silent kid.

The interior may be ripped, stained and smelly.

No matter that it uses a liter of transmission oil every 50 miles.

The stereo kicked the bucket a few decades back, and the dials don’t even turn.

The rickety piece of junk constantly has a billowing cloud of black smoke following behind.

The one prayer on your lips on the entire trip is that the rains do not start, for the wipers do not work.

Your best friend hogs the shotgun seat, and keeps his sneakers firmly planted on the hole on the floor – lest water from the puddles on the road splash inside.

Nobody will say a word.

Nobody will even say a word about the non-functional reverse gear. That part of the transmission packed up ages ago. They are just impressed that you own a car, and driving it.

You wouldn’t care, anyways.

That piece of junk meant no more queues at bus stops (at the mercy of pick pockets). No more begging parents for rides. No more places you couldn’t go – Ok, let’s say within a 20-mile (walking) radius from home.

That car represented FREEDOM!

If only people were so easy to impress today!

That was in the mid 90’s. It’s neither here nor there, but everything has greatly turned out for the better. It’s not just in car engineering, with better transmissions and inline or slanting cylinders – but, also in the economics of car ownership.

Presently, it’s as easy as ABC, to own a ride, brand new. It doesn’t matter if the need is business-driven or family-oriented, one can drive home.

Co-op Bank has the special Motor Vehicle Purchase Schemes established with major motor vehicle dealers, Isuzu East Africa Ltd.

This is structured to enable Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) acquire vehicles they need with an incredible 95% funding, under the Biashara Iendelee na Isuzu financing deal.

As a plus, business people have the liberty to apply an additional working capital of Ksh. 300,000.00, and a loan repayment holiday of 60 days.

One can visit any Co-op Bank branch across the country to get more info on this deal, or check Biashara Iendelee na Isuzu promotion online

Click here from the comfort of your office or home.

What’s the most remarkable story you’ve heard from a long-distance truck driver?

Posted on by Kibaki Muthamia

My name is Ali, and I’ve always been a motor head. I literally grew up in an auto garage. I got used to hot radiator steam burns, oil spillages, gaskets, crankshafts, turbo heads and God know what else under the hood – before I could walk.

My father ran a family garage, and his father before him. I could drive before I learnt the alphabet, and, frankly speaking, missing school wasn’t a big deal, then. But, a careless oil smudge on a client’s car upholstery would earn you a fearsome spanking. Or, a misplaced rotary spanner head.

The family dinner table wasn’t the classic family dinner table. Heck, we didn’t even have a dinner table. We’d eat, sprawled on the patchy garage floor littered with pieces of a dis-bowelled engine.

There was a bare yellow bulb hanging high from the rafters – and, sometimes it would blow out. It’d be days before anyone replaced it.

But the moments were magical. I’d spend hours listening to father rattle about this or that engine part. He’d periodically have 3 or 4 apprentices learning from him. He wouldn’t charge learning fees, lots of times it’d be returning favors owed to their fathers. Or, something else.

At one point, there’s an apprentice who spent months in our garage – and when he stopped coming, we wouldn’t know how to trace him. No one knew his name.

A beautiful section of The Great North Road…

Well, I didn’t attend high school. I opted for a driving and mechanic course at the local Eldoret Polytechnic. For the papers. I already knew more about engines than they could ever teach me. It was both fun and exhausting.

Have you ever sat through a terrific story you’ve heard a few hundred times before? Well, that kind of fun and exhausting.

Fast forward a decade, and, a half. Perhaps. The garage still runs, and my father is semi-retired. Which means he likes to hover over my kid brother as he takes care of client’s engines. Kind of explains kiddo always got earphones on, blasting away.

I could never sit still, and engines are engines, anyway. I preferred driving, and took that up as my vocation.

Since then, I’ve been driving all over Africa for different clients. I have been in everything from commercial trucks and buses, Safari tour vans to executive, luxury cabs. My love, though, lies in long-distance trucking. Big, high-riding trucks.

A lot of remarkable experiences happen in these long transit runs.

For instance, while with Red Cross, I was doing the Isiolo-Moyale-Marsabit Road to deliver supplies to a charity outpost on the Ethiopian border. This was a newly tarmacked road, into a hitherto unexplored hinterland. Travel enthusiasts were a dime a dozen doing road trips, and camping.

I had been on that road a few times, and it was an endless piece of obscurity – “Oh, look, more sand…..” ain’t that exciting, right? The road, though was beautiful. A straight line of flawless bitumen, and few cars.

On that day, just past Merille – a dusty, hot town just before Marsabit, an open-back pickup truck pulls up. We are not speeding. My truck is high up – am in an Isuzu FSR – so I can look down on the pickup. It’s an Isuzu D-Max.

It seems like a family, the man is driving, alone in the cabin. Nothing odd about that. What gave me a ‘WHAAAT’ moment, was that the lady was in the rear, open part – and a little boy is propped up on a mattress and cushions just behind the driver’s cabin.

She is slicing tomatoes onto a pan. As they pass, I notice what seems like a modern kitchen-full worth of fittings on that rear part.

Is the man driving as the wife cooks in the rear? Like, is this a family road trip idea?

A little ways down the road, I notice the Isuzu D-Max parked on the roadside. The family is sitting down to a hot meal! They wave, as I blow my air horn……..

A perfect family moment, on the road!

***************

Co-op Bank has a vehicle financing deal with Isuzu – , dubbed ‘Biashara Iendelee na Isuzu – that gives clients up to 95% funding on selected vehicle brands to boost Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

These are versatile lorry and pick-up trucks ideal for business, from Isuzu Kenya.

If they wish, clients can also apply for a Ksh.500,000 working capital facility to ride out the crippling Covid-19 season. Other exciting perks is the 60 day grace period, a negotiated motor vehicle insurance cover and the longest, flexible re-payment periods in the market – 5 years.

I hope more families with a knack for road trips gets wind of this deal.

Visit the nearest Co-op Bank branch, or click here for inquiries about Biashara Iendelee na Isuzu.