China’s EV surge continues

Donald Trump might find a dogma conundrum if he takes a close look at the Middle Kingdom’s exploding electric vehicle industry.

While he blamed America for sitting on its hands while China prospered, President Trump’s first budget attempts followed Republican dogma by minimising government intervention and removing a $US7500 EV subsidy.

At the same time, China’s government has helped create an industry from scratch by mandating minimum EV sales.

Where GM put a toe in the EV water two decades ago and found it too cold and Tesla dove in headfirst without knowing how to stay afloat, China is turning out not just new EVs every week, but new EV companies.

While the Teslavangelists insist the Californian company created the nascent EV market, the Chinese would respectfully disagree. For one thing, the world’s biggest selling EV is Chinese and, secondly, it doesn’t suffer Tesla’s self-confessed “production hell”.

November alone has seen an explosion of nine new EVs (so far) announced in China, with more than 15 of them announced and/or shown in October.

Red might be the colour of China, but – like those in Europe, Japan and Korea -- its EV makers have universally chosen blue as the colour of electric power.

Next week’s Guangzhou motor show, north-west of Hong Kong, will be a showcase for the exploding Chinese EV scene, so you might want to keep an eye out for the following new models.

Arcfox Lite
To design a trendy two-seater for city-dwellers, Arcfox turned to a semi-retired Italian shoe designer and gave him a studio in Barcelona, which may or may not still be in Spain this week.

Fortunately, the shoe-design part of his career came late for Walter de Silva, the Italian automotive design figurehead who headed both Audi and Volkswagen Group design and who personally penned the original A5 Coupe, along with the Alfa Romeo 156, 166 and 147.

And Arcfox is no under-funded fly-by-nighter. It’s a new brand from BJEV, which is BAIC’s electric-vehicle sub-brand, and it’s targeted directly at a younger market.

To accelerate the entire building-a-new-range-from-nothing process, most of the design and engineering work has been farmed out to German firm EDAG, which outfitted a stand-along studio with 560 designers just for Arcfox.

It plans to bring eight new models to market, including two or three SUVs, within three years, starting with the Lite, which will be followed up by a supercar, then a mid-size SUV.

It will dip into sections of the rainbow rarely used in production cars, partly to distance itself from more run-of-the-mill BJEV offerings.

Some of its youth-oriented features include LED screens at both ends to allow its drivers to show the world how they’re feeling, in either emoticon or in old-school letters, in either Chinese or English.

You know how most of the world’s cars now come with infotainment screens? Well, this tiny city machine’s cabin will be lined with not one, not two, but three 8.0-inch screens for movie watching.

You’ll probably be able to do that while you’re driving, to be honest, because 35kW of power is going to leave you plenty of time to react.

On the flipside, the little front-wheel drive is only 895kg and is slated to cost 106,800 yuan (about $A16,000).

The infinitely sexier supercar, the Arcfox-7, is due in production in 2019.

NIO
The most keenly awaited brand off the mark has been NIO, which has a strong Formula E team that used to be called NextEV.

Nio also holds the EV lap record of the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife circuit, with its megaWatt EP9 whipping around in 7:05.120 last year, but it’s only building six of them, so it hardly counts as a production car.

Instead, NIO’s first production car will be the ES8 SUV, which will launch on December 16 in China.

The Shanghai company claims a range of 355km from the seven-seat, three-row SUV, which it claims will whip to 100km/h in 4.4 seconds. If that sounds like it’s targeted at something big from California, then the shoe fits.

So far, the seven-seat SUV is a China-only car, with a 2997mm wheelbase and still sneaking beneath the five-metre barrier at 4978mm, with the entire structure and body made from aluminium to save weight.

The all-wheel drive will use air suspension and it has been designed to enable the batteries to be recharged or to have the entire battery pack swapped out.

It won’t be an exclusively NIO affair, though, because it’s being built in a joint-venture (normally a China-some other country operation) with Jianhguai-Weilai (JAC) and built in JAC’s factory.

JAC has another joint-venture agreement in place with the Volkswagen Group to build cheap Seat EVs, signed just weeks ago.

It also has a cooperation agreement with Chongqing Changan Automobile (the fourth-largest car-maker in China) to develop electric cars.

Founded by internet entrepreneur William Li, NIO raised more than $US1 billion in fundraising this week, according to Reuters, after raising $US600 million in March, and the latest raise values the not-yet-a-carmaker at more than $US5 billion.

Its biggest shareholder is internet giant Tencent, which has a market capitalisation of nearly half a trillion dollars (and also has an investment in Tesla).

If it all goes to plan, NIO won’t remain a China-only brand, because it plans to launch an autonomous electric car globally in 2020.

Beijing Dearcar Auto Technology
Badges in 1970s and 1980s Japan were such a comedy Godsend that they gave birth to their own language – Japlish – and people should be aware that those days haven’t disappeared. They’ve just moved to China. Exhibit A, your Worship, is the DearCC EV10.

DearCC is the new brand of Beijing Dearcar Auto Technologies, which is a brand of SouEast Motors. Never heard of them, either? Fair enough, but it has a joint-venture operation with Mitsubishi.

Its EV10 is an urban-focused car and, despite the alpha-numeric hint, it’s DearCC’s first ever production car. It learned lessons about enriching the model mix with options from MINI and Opel’s Adam, so it sports two-tone paintwork and claims a range of 155km from the battery pack.

The five-door hatch sits its 3692mm-long bodyshell on a 2400mm wheelbase and it’s only 1650mm wide and uses a 42kW electric motor on the front axle, which should be enough for city work because it only weighs 1050kg (remarkable, given the weight of lithium-ion batteries).

Until the EV10, Beijing Dearcar has been more known as a tech company consulting to the car industry. It was deeply involved in the development of the Zhima E30, which helped Zotye to number eight in the world’s top 10 EV makers, ahead of BMW and Chevrolet and into a joint-venture agreement with Ford.

But a boom is a boom so now Beijing Dearcar is trying to join the party.

Leap Motor LP-S01
The world’s car industry was on a business-dominated glide path to Boringtown until Mazda’s MX-5 arrived. Can the same thing happen with EVs?

Leap Motor hopes so, bucking the SUV and city hatch trend with a small, cheap 2+2 coupe and whispering about a convertible (which doesn’t sound much fun in a polluted Beijing winter traffic jam).

The MX-5 comparison goes further, because the LP-S01 is about the same size as the Japanese icon and gets to 100km/h in a claimed 6.9 seconds, with a claimed top speed of 190km/h.

It’s also not overwhelmed by power, with only 125kW and 250Nm of torque, and Leap Motor claims a 360km range before a recharge of its lithium-ion batteries.

And it will all cost less than $20,000 (110,000 yuan) in China when it goes on sale in 2019.

Some of its claimed features include taking a leaf from Apple’s iPhone book and ditching the key in favour of facial recognition to open and start the car and a smartphone app opens a live video feed from the car, whether it’s stationary or mobile.

The problem is going to be production, rather than demand. Leap Motor was only founded this year and, even then, its seed capital was only $US380 million.

In spite of that it’s claiming a production capacity of 250,000 cars a year, which makes no sense to anybody with any expertise in any kind of manufacturing, much less automotive manufacturing.

BJEV (all of it)
BJEV is the brand that yet again proves the Chinese carmakers could use a good naming agency, with its next car set to be the BJEV EX400L. With no spaces.

The electric compact crossover should deliver a convincing 400km of EV range at a price range starting at $A29,500 (150,000 yuan).

It’s got production cred, too, because it BJEV is a sub-brand of the state-owned BAIC in Beijing, whose EC-Series was the world’s biggest selling EV in September.

BAIC has 110,000 employees and makes more than 2.5 million cars a year, making it China’s fifth-biggest car-maker.

So far this year, BJEV has claimed 23 per cent of China’s enforced EV market and it’s targeting 50 per cent annualised growth. So it’s a serious contender.

The EX400L is one of just four EVs it’s launching this year alone, with an EC200, the EV300 and a city-car all on the books before 2018.

Yogomo Exing
Yes, this is the company thaxoff the Volkswagen Microbus before the Germans had a chance to turn it from a concept car into a production reality.

It was so overjoyed at the attention that brought it that it did the same thing with Kia’s Picanto concept.

Now it has arrived with something that’s all its own work in the Exing, a city-focused cheap car.

Despite its cloning history, Yogomo is well respected in China and its 3.6-metre Exing is only 1.6 metres wide and has a 155km range. Its price tag of less than $A9000 should give it a strong base.

Landwind E400
No conversation on the attacks of the clones would be complete without Landwind, which gained notoriety for ripping off the Range Rover Evoque with its X7, then fighting off the design’s creators in Chinese copyright court.

But now it has built the E400 (a name sure to raise eyebrows at Sindelfingen, Germany, where the three-pointed star tops plenty of roofs).

Rather than build a new car on a new EV architecture, Landwind converted its internal-combustion X2 crossover to electric power, giving it 252km of range to create its first EV.

Haima @3
For a country that forbids Twitter, this is either genius naming or just naivety. Hard to say, but Haima has developed links with Mazda by using superseded Japanese architectures on its cheap cars.

The @3 was launched early in November, with 202km of range and a grille that will disturb Lexus. It’s essentially an EV version of petrol-powered B-segment car that’s been on sale since 2014.