Jaecoo swamped by EV rush

Omoda Jaecoo Australia is one of many EV manufacturers facing unexpected high demand for battery-electric vehicles as the Iran conflict continues, so much so it’s had to rethink how it keeps up and how its dealers communicate with customers.

The growing Chery sub-brand is fast-tracking processes to keep up with a massive and largely unexpected uptick in orders for the Jaecoo J5 EV small SUV.

“We have definitely seen in the last two months – more so in March – that EV [demand] has sky-rocketed,” Omoda Jaecoo Australia Chief commercial officer Roy Munoz said.

“We didn’t expect this sudden surge – there’s a bit of growing pains there.”

Those growing pains are being felt by some J5 EV customers who, according to comments on the Jaecoo J5 EV Australia Facebook page, are being faced confusion over delivery windows after deposits were taken.

While some buyers have reported their cars arriving after just a month, others have been waiting six weeks or more, with dealers not communicating a clear delivery timeframe.

It should be noted that new vehicle orders can often take several months to fill, as noted by Toyota with its new RAV4: typically a three-month wait.

Munoz admitted that the significant J5 EV demand increase was unprecedented and that he had to work with dealers to improve both logistics resources and communication.

“At the moment, we are in unprecedented times, and the dealers have had to be given a friendly but firm reminder that they need to provide more resource to handle the influx of vehicles for PD [pre-delivery], storage; to make sure they are prepared for that as well,” he said.

“We are also working hard to provide better visibility to match orders to what is being produced in the factory as the orders come in. We need to manage the comms much better.”

To that end, Munoz said the company was working to improve transparency by ensuring buyers could track their vehicle’s progress from the factory to the dealer via the VIN – something other manufacturers have done for years now.

“If a VIN isn’t identified and allocated to a customer and it’s on a ship, we want to provide that to the dealers.

“So we are working with our logistics team both locally and at HQ to give this information and match them as quickly as possible and straight out to the network. That is happening as we speak.”

Munoz was confident the extra production allocation and ongoing steps taken to smooth out the delivery process would ensure the swollen J5 EV order bank would be filled by the end of June.

“We’ve got probably another 3500 orders to fill; that’s growing each day as we are writing orders as well.

“We have secured extra production, so we should be able to realise orders we currently have by the end of the financial year.”

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