New vehicle choices in Europe

[landmannnn]

In Europe the pickup (aka Ute, bakkie) market has gone strange..

The only models available new are the Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux and the Isuzu Dmax.

None are bad vehicles, but that's it, nothing else.

Be thankful that you have some choice!

 

[Old.Tony]

I'm not sure how long we're going to have choice here either. Over 50% of Australians say that their next vehicle purchase will be electric. For utes, that's either the Ford F150, the Rivian or the Tesla Cyber Truck. Nissan don't seem to have anything on offer apart from an aging Leaf and, second hand, these are near worthless as the batteries need replacing and that costs big $, apparently.

I don't know how that's going to pan out for us. We have a map of charging locations and they cover a great deal of the highways in Australia, but they're not all fast chargers - in fact, some of them are ordinary household power outlets that have been made available for electric vehicles. In Australia, that means 10 amps @ 240V = 2.4kW per hour of recharge. Got a Tesla that's nearly out? You need to put 70kWh in? Guess what, you're staying there for over a day. Not 15 minutes. Not an hour. That's 29 hours of charging.

Australia has to lift its game considerably. For the time being, those fossil-fuelled machines are still very viable in this market, no matter who's making them (people are even buying the Chinese junk produced by LDV/Great Wall as well as the Ssangyong Musso and the considerably-more-agricultural-than-a-D22 Mahindra.

 

[tweak'e]

Over 50% of Australians say that their next vehicle purchase will be electric. For utes, that's either the Ford F150, the Rivian or the Tesla Cyber Truck.

yeah thats not happening.
the rivian is the only contender at this stage and i don't think they have the factory up and running yet. plus expect price tag to be 100k+.
small electric cars for the daily commute is more like it.

 

[tweak'e]

covid has been playing havoc with supply lines and manufacturing. plus all the shipping issues.

 

[GunMentalGrey]

Given pretty much everywhere other than the USA use hilux sized utes is guess that an electric version can’t be too many years away.

I did see somewhere recently there’s an EV D23 Navara version getting around in China.

Edit: Nissan Navara goes electric! Nissan-Dongfeng Rich 6 the world's first EV dual-cab

Also, I just searched Navara ev and came up with an article or two indicating Nissan is looking at an EV Navara and a hybrid model in a couple of years.

 

[Old.Tony]

^ And in the spirit of "staying in the game", Toyota are considering bringing the Tundra to Australia. I've seen a couple - they're as big as a Titan/Silverado/RAM. Word is that they don't want to manufacture the vehicle in a "Right Hand Drive" variant, they will import LHD vehicles and convert them but they're working on how to do that.