Deepal seeks redemption with S07 ADAS overhaul

Newcomer Chinese brand Deepal is hoping swift action to fix the overly-intrusive driver assist systems in its Australian debut model, the S07 electric SUV, will also help repair its local image.

Over-the-air updates to retune the software in the S07s of private customers were due to begin this week following intensive work both in Australia and China by Deepal engineers and management of its parent company Changan.

Confirmation the OTA updates of driver monitoring and cruise control systems were about to begin were part of a three-pronged announcement by Deepal Australia general manager Cormac Caffola at the Melbourne motor show last Friday night.

Caffola also revealed the local pricing of the E07 Multitrack transformer SUV-Ute and opened pre-orders for the compact S05, both of which arrive later this year.

Caffola admitted the intrusiveness of the ADAS systems in the S07 – which were widely reported and criticised in Australian media reviews – had impacted on Deepal’s standing among Australian car buyers.

“It obviously had an influence,” he said. “We’d like to think the redemption arc of what we are doing now will absolutely recover confidence in the brand.”

Intrusive ADAS systems are not unique to Deepal among Chinese brands and the inability to get them right across multiple models has also been a common issue.

But Caffola insisted Deepal wouldn’t be a repeat offender.

“We’d be crazy not to learn our lesson and then just go and make the same [mistakes] again,” he said.

“Everything we do and every bit of insight from the market we feed back into the product teas for all future products.

“So E07, we have a team of engineers coming here in the next two or three weeks purely to make sure that car is engineered properly.

“They’ll be testing all of the infotainment, all of the driver systems, all of the intelligent controls to make sure they work exactly as they need to.

“So it’s really important we learn.”

While the S07s ADAS tune was wrong when it launched in Australia, Caffola said he took heart from the quick response to the issue out of China.

“Whilst they [safety system tune] were set up with the best interest in mind, we understood they didn’t suit the Australian consumer as well as they could have.

“So, we set about immediately working with them. They sent over their executive team from the Changan group, their engineers from Deepal and they came en masse to understand the product.

“They sat in the car, they drove it and they took every bit of feedback we gave them.

“Within 24 hours they had a project team working on it. They sent us a couple ideas on how to fix it and they have re-engineered the entire software.”

Deepal was due to test the OTA update on a couple of its own cars before launching it to privately-owned S07s. Just how many there are is unknown because the brand does not publicly report its sales.

“We will,” promised Caffola. “Our focus has been fixing the S07 and making sure we engineer that car for what our customers expect.”

Software isn’t the only update Deepal Australia has recently made. It also announced in February the doubling of service intervals from 10,000km to 20,000km and the abandonment of an initial 5000km service.

Deepal is distributed in Australia by the independent automotive giant Inchcape, which also handles Subaru, Peugeot and Foton here.

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