Chery introduces iCar GT, Sterra ET SUV and Sterra ES electric sedan
The Chinese electric car market is getting busier every day and it’s not getting any clearer. New brands are popping up pretty much every month and the majority of them are sub-brands of already existing EV manufacturers. Chery decided that it would be a good idea to add to the confusion and introduced two new brands with one of them already having its own sub-brand.
Let’s start with the most controversial news - the iCar. Chery has owned the iCar brand for a while but it was always associated with funky, tiny city cars. The company realized that the competition at the bottom is far too fierce to make decent profits and it decided to switch its strategy. The iCar is being repositioned as a luxury brand, completely independent of Chery.
The iCar brand will offer two vehicles and the first is the iCar GT. The company only presented a design sketch of the car with the real thing to be unveiled on April 18 at the Shanghai Auto Show. The second car will be a hard-core SUV named S56 and it will be introduced for the first to the public two days before the iCar GT. We can’t wait to find out more about both of the vehicles.
The second brand is a bit more complicated because it’s not actually a brand. Chinese automakers love to group their cars into families or series. Chery is no different and it created a new brand called Exeed which has already a few vehicles out in the market. The brand is focusing again on luxury vehicles but it doesn’t offer electric cars.
To fix that, Chery announced a new sub-brand of Exeed - the Sterra. Together with the announcement, the company unveiled two production-ready electric cars with some serious specifications. Both EVs are built on the 800V EV platform called E0X and both have been given a 700 km range rating by the CLTC.
Sterra ES is an electric sedan, at 4.95 meters in length this is not a small car and its 2.9-meter wheelbase make it equal in size to Tesla Model S. The company did not reveal the technical details but it claims the car can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in just 3 seconds. The battery pack is supplied by CATL and the vehicle has a 700 km range rating.
Sterra ET, on the other hand, is a premium SUV. It uses the same platform as its sedan sibling and it has similar dimensions. Its powertrain is the same but due to its size, it is expected to be marginally slower.
The Shanghai Auto Show this year is looking really busy, there are tons of premieres lined up, every major EV brand has an announcement prepared and there are tens of new models to be unveiled. As usual - we will bring you all the latest news as soon as it breaks.
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