Ask someone shopping for a light truck what matters and they will tell you payload. Ask a driver who has spent two years delivering in Lagos and he will tell you about turning.
The JMC Carrying turns inside roughly six metres. That number decides whether you can get into a market street, whether you can turn around at a dead end without a three-point manoeuvre that blocks traffic, and whether a delivery takes ten minutes or forty.
Payload matters too, obviously. But payload is a constraint you meet a few times a week. Turning circle is a constraint you meet at every single stop.
The engine
A 2.5-litre diesel with Bosch common rail injection, running at about 45 per cent thermal efficiency. That efficiency figure is the one that shows up on your fuel bill: it is the share of the energy in the diesel that actually becomes motion instead of heat.
For a vehicle covering long distances with a load on it, a few points of thermal efficiency compounds into real money over a year. It is a duller specification than horsepower and a more useful one.
One platform, three bodies
The Carrying comes as a chassis cab, a dropside and a cargo box on the same underlying vehicle. That is worth understanding before you order, because the body determines what the truck can do for you and it cannot be changed cheaply afterwards.
| Body | Suits |
|---|---|
| Chassis cab | You are fitting your own body — tanker, tipper, refrigerated unit, workshop |
| Dropside | Loading from the side or by hand, mixed cargo, building materials |
| Cargo box | Goods that need to stay dry and out of sight — retail stock, distribution |
The common mistake is ordering a dropside because it looks versatile, then discovering that everything you carry needs to be covered and secured. Think about what your goods actually are.
The cost side, after July
A 2.5 diesel is over 2,000cc and pays the 2 per cent green tax band that took effect on 1 July 2026. The same reform cut the levy on new vehicles from 20 per cent to 10 and on used ones from 15 to 5, across 127 tariff lines.
For a business buying a working vehicle rather than a car, that is a meaningful shift in what a fleet costs to assemble.
Truck or pickup
If your load fits on a pickup tray and you sometimes need to leave the tarmac, the Vigus with its low-range transfer case is the better buy. If your load is bulk and the roads are roads, the Carrying moves more per trip and costs less per unit moved.
The answer usually comes from one question: how many trips are you making now, and would a bigger body cut that number.
Send us what you move and where on WhatsApp and we will work out which body and which vehicle earns its keep.
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