Geely EC7-EV will hit the Chinese car market in Q1

Reading Time: 2 minutes

News like this to your inbox or phone?

Weekly summary to your inbox

Never miss and important news

Get Instant notification once the news is published.

- Advertisement -

This is the new Geely EC7-EV, and electric car for China based on the Geely Emgrand EC7 sedan. The Emgrand name will be phased out so the EC7-EV will be just a Geely. Grille comes with a funky blue line because blue = green.

The Geely EC7-EV will be launched on the Chinese car market in the first quarter. Price will start around 300.000 yuan before green car subsidies from central and local governments. Subsidies on a vehicle like the EC7-EV can be as much as 90.000 yuan ($14.460) so sticker price at the dealer will be some 210.000 yuan ($33.830).

- Advertisement -

I met this vehicle at a high tech show in Shenzhen. A Geely staff member sat in the driver”s seat, fuzzling with his mobile phone, and refusing to get out of the way, let alone get out of the car. Typical state-owned-company mentality in a privately owned company. Doomed!

- Advertisement -

The interior looks otherwise pretty nice. Fine materials and an especially strong center tunnel and gear selector. Large screen on the center console with blue detailing (blue = green). Only dissonant ios the instrument binnacle that doesn’t look any special EV-tech at all.

geely-ec7-ev-china-3

The Geely EC7-EV will be powered by an electric motor with 129hp. Curb weight is 1600 kilo. Range is 150 kilometer, which is on par with other Chinese electric cars of he same size and kind. Top speed is 130 kilometer per hour and 0-100 is gone in 12 seconds. No other specifications available at the moment.

The EC7-EV will be the first mass-produced electric vehicle for Geely. They are a bit late in the game but we hear many more EV is on the way. Most other Chinese automakers are launching as many electrics as they can as well; will the electric car market in China finally take off?

- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -

14 COMMENTS

  1. The market of the EV will for sure take off in 2015, but not with poor EV like this. Performance and range are quite ridicolous for the today EV technologies. This EV, as many others from domestic automakers, has been created on the base of very old battery technologies. Good to show a commitment to the green energy that the government require, but not good at all for the consumers. Today is easy to create car with range over 500 km with one charge and high performance, so why launch in the market a product that is already obsolete ?

    • I’ve always admired your comments and waited for them, but I do have a question in mind: what are the EVs that you like? I’m willing to buy an EV but it seems that the range is so diverse…

    • If it is so easy to make an electric car over 500km, why is there only one offered?
      It is not because they offer a lower range that the technology is obsolete. Not everybody wants to spend $100,000 for a car.
      Like the rest of cars, there are different classes

  2. Dear Jay,
    i cannot read properly your question because it is obscured by advertisement. I suppose you ask me about the range of the EV .
    Well the range depend uniquely from the type of lithium battery are used into the battery pack. There are high energy density cells like the one used into Tesla since already 7 years, and low energy density cell that are an obsolete technology but still quite easy to be outsourced in the domestic market. The problem is not even the price as the new battery are also competitive for the cost. It’s just a question of engineering. Looks that the 99% of the EV engineers in China are not updated with the best technologies and the automakers are not intended to invest a single RMB in R&D for their upcoming EV.
    The reality is that the domestic automaker still rely in the IC cars and just introduce some zero engineering cost EV to please the government.

    • Thanks Marco for your comments! We are working on the advertisement-over-comments problem. The BYD e6 is finally available in Beijing, sales started about six month ago, and I have seen one (1) on the road so far. As for the batteries, I think price is the most important issue why Chinese automakers don’t move to high energy density cells. It is not only the price for the battery itself, which is indeed not that much more expensive than a base lithium ion, but the price for the extra and high tech engineering that comes with high energy density cells. There is just no way you can put all that in a minivan or a small car and sell it for a competitive price. A Tesla, brilliant as it is, costs five times more than this EC7-RV. Chinese automakers are not aiming at Tesla. They are aiming at a more practical and lower level, like the minivans and buses, and they are dead-serious about it.

      • Dear Tycho, i doubt how much seriuos the Chinese automakers are about EV. Actually i work in the field of the EV since 25 years and i can make sure that the enginering to make a good EV is not expensive at all, just need the correct ideas and suppliers. The high pergormance long range EV technology is available since several years, just need to be a bit updated, with automakers ready to invest into innovative projects. Still i cannot see a Chinese Elon Musk…but many low risk and low investment conservative companies !

        • I highly doubt that China’s automakers have the R&D funds to engage in such frivolous pursuits, such as EV production. Given the fact that they hardly dominate their own domestic market and the lack of charging infrastructure, it would be very, very unlikely that demand for locally-made EVs will increase by a significant amount (Just look at BYD), especially given the fact that the Chinese are known to be enormous badge snobs. It is not as simple as you present it to be, to engineer an EV that could easily enter mass production from scratch. Reliability, design, safety, affordability and durability would always be key issues for any car manufacturer, let alone the ones from China. They could not all be Eton Musk and simply source all the material from known sources, they simply do not have the funding or resources or the right connections. It’s rather surprising that these cars could rival established players like the Chevy Volt, Prius and Leaf. We should perhaps set that as the benchmark for these Chinese EV newcomers, rather than Tesla, BMW i3 & VW eUP (All of which are more akin to high-cost performance cars.)

  3. Jay,
    finally i can read your post. In China market there are 3 beliveable EV at the moment : QQEv , last model with 200 km range and a very low cost, the Beijing new energy E 200 that should have a range around 240 km and a medium price, finally the most expensive but also longer range is the BYD E6. If you can spend 1 million RMB there is no doubt that Tesla S is the best EV available in the market.
    The problem of the Chinese made EV is that they are not available everywhere as for the regionalization of the market. So if you live in Shenzhen you only can purchase a BYD, as well in Beijing probabaly you can only buy a E200 …

  4. From my experience testing some of these EVs from Chinese OEMs the past 6 months, the range number they provide is an exaggeration of about 30-40% even under very idea testing conditions (i.e. on chassis dynamometer – on the road its even less).

    With a Tesla, BMW i3, or VW eUP, you can more or less match the stated range if you drive efficiently, even within a traffic-condensed city such as Beijing. With the Chinese EVs, there is absolutely no way to get close to the figures they quote (I state this from 6+ months of testing), and furthermore if any auxiliaries are used, the SoC drops at a rate much higher than the cars I just listed (i.e. we are talking about 1-2% charge lost per minute for some of these cars!).

    So I would really take the data which is announced by the Chinese OEMs with a large grain of salt, and its quite a pity that there is no regulation or checks of validity of these claims.

    • I partially agree with AK. Actualy the range is stated from the capacity of the battery pack that in the case of most of the chinese automakers is not less in numbers then the western countrparts ( that also downplay with EV ).
      The problem is that Chinese automakers often use for their EV conversion, very heavy body cars, with bad aerodynamics and even worst mechanical efficiency. There is no attention to a lot of details that could help to upgrade the dynamic efficiency , like the tires, the transmission. No way that anybody of the domestic carmaker can come out with a low weight body car. All these problems affect the final performance and range of the domestic EVs.. If just the local automakers could invest a little money to focalize in these simple points we will see a great improvement in their EV production…

    • Could you present any form of evidence? Methods of testing? Road Conditions? Could you list all the examples of the Chinese-made EVs you have driven? Distance? If not, it makes your claim sound dubious at best. In which case, it could be due to BCL. NEC, GM and Toyota hasn’t got around that hurdle yet.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

- Advertisement -