Changan is the latest Chinese car brand to launch in the UK, doing so with a new £39,990 electric SUV that has been engineered in the UK and designed in Italy.
The Changan Deepal S07 will be in the first of the 20 new Changan dealerships this month and will be followed into showrooms later this year by a smaller Deepal S05 model, which will be revealed at next week’s Munich motor show.
Ex-Nissan executive Nic Thomas is Changan’s UK managing director and told Autocar that the British engineering in the brand’s cars would shine through in how they drive.
“You will see the difference versus some of the other cars that are coming to market,” he said.
Based in Chongqing, Changan can trace its roots back to being a trading arm of the Chinese government back in the 1860s but moved into cars in the 1950s when it started manufacturing Jeeps under licence. Its first own-brand cars followed in the 1980s.
In 2010, it laid the groundwork for a global launch of its models with a UK R&D centre in Birmingham that's home to 100 engineers. This is seen as crucial in ensuring its cars are ready to launch in the UK – as is a design centre in Italy that's home to around 300 designers.
Work on the Deepal S07 from the UK engineering team included a full rebuild and redesign of the suspension in just three months to make it more suitable for UK roads and driving tastes, plus extensive calibration work on the automated driving assistance functions to better tailor the software.
"Our software works really well and has been properly tailored to provide a customer a really usable experience," Thomas said.
The Deepal S07 is a Tesla Model Y-sized crossover that will be sold in just one, fully loaded trim level. It's rear-wheel-drive with a 215bhp, 236lb ft motor and an 80kWh battery that’s good for a 295-mile range.
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Sorry but I don't want my car home market dominated by one country makes of cars, I don't care if they're cheaper better made etc I want to support my own European brands brands that I know have been on the roads all my life, maybe the Governments of Europe think about home rather than putting pressure on the brands we drive every day.
It doesn't matter where cars are manufactured,why is it likely that Chinese vehicles will dominate sales here we had similar fears when Japanese came on sale here over fifty years ago that didn't happen and now there is no British owned car manufacturer and both Nissan & Toyota build cars here. Personally I'm rather glad that cheaper better made cars are becoming more available here and putting pressure on legacy manufacturers to reduce the cost and improve the quality of cars available here can only be a good thing for consumers here
America in the 60's/70's had its brands over run .
But, by all means go ahead and buy your Chinese cars, but while it's almost impossible to avoid buying Chinese made goods in general, it's still possible to buy non-Chinese made cars. So I'll give the Chinese cars a miss, regardless of how cheap Chinese government's subsidies make them.