Pelican Engineering eyes "sizeable" 7.5-tonne electric truck market

Commercial vehicle importer Pelican Engineering is returning to the truck market, with the introduction of YuTong's electric 7.5-tonner.

The business has not sold any new trucks in the UK for 12 years, having switched its focus to buses.

Pelican Engineering is the longest family-owned automotive dealership in the UK, having been founded in 1919. Over the years, this family operation has been authorised dealer for the likes of MAN, DAF, Foden, Hino and Seddon Atkinson.

When Pelican’s MAN Truck & Bus sales franchise ended in the early 2010s, managing director Richard Crump plugged the gap – on the bus side at least – with YuTong. Given the scarcity of Chinese products on European roads back then, this was a brave move – but one that paid-off with over 2,000 registrations to date, over half of which are electric.

When the opportunity arose to import YuTong trucks, Crump was all too keen to get involved and end Pelican’s 12-year hiatus of new truck sales, and one of the first decisions was to decide which market to compete in.

He explained: “YuTong has a wide range of trucks from 3.5t to over 50t but we decided to start simple with just one product in one particular category. For us, it was obvious that the 7.5t market was the lowest hanging fruit as its well suited to electrification, there’s less competition, but with over 3,000 registrations, it’s still a sizeable market – almost 30 years after the licence changes”.

YuTong’s TE7, which has been on sale in China since 2023, was the ideal fit and together the companies worked on gaining UK type approval which has proven to be quite tricky as the UK is both the first European and right-hand-drive market for the TE7.

Now that the TE7 is in the final stages of gaining type approval for the UK, the priority for Pelican is to get the order books filled and it has recently recruited David Watts, previously of MAN, Arrival and VW, as new truck sales manager.

“We’re focusing on direct sales channels for the TE7 and David has already had some fantastic conversations with a number of leading fleets. That said, we would definitely be interested in speaking to truck dealers around the country about possible franchise opportunities," said Crump.

With lead times of between six and seven months, Pelican plans to hold between 10 and 20 trucks in stock at any one time.

In terms of aftersales, Pelican will be offering a range of flexible repair and maintenance contracts with 24/7 operational support. This can be carried out by either Pelican’s 23 field-based engineers or through any of Sapphire Vehicle Service’s 14 regional workshops, with Pelican’s UK warehouse holding around £8m in YuTong parts stock.

Neither YuTong nor Pelican Engineering has announced the next steps on their product roll-out strategy for the UK but Crump was clear he is in no rush to make the next steps.

He said: “Even though YuTong has a wide HGV portfolio, we are concentrating purely on the 7.5t at the moment. Possibly, the next steps would be to homologate a higher weighted version of the TE7 but I doubt we would be doing anything beyond that in the medium term”.

“There are a lot of questions around what happens above 26t and for long-distance haulage; European manufacturers seem to be opting for hydrogen whereas YuTong and a lot of the Chinese manufacturers seem to be siding with battery swapping, which takes considerable investment from the operator”.

“With so much in the air still, we’re just concentrating our effort on the lighter end of the market”.