This Is Volkswagen’s New Cheap EV For China

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This is the new cheap Volkswagen EV for China, seen on leaked patent drawings. It will use the Seat logo and Seat’s Chinese name. The space for the square-shaped Seat badge is clearly visible on the grille. Sadly, and somewhat badly, the whole car is a rather lazy job.

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The new Seat-badged Volkswagen EVs are made by a new joint venture called JAC-Volkswagen.

JAC, or Jianghuai Automobile Corporation, already makes a series of small EVs, pretty good ones in fact. Volkswagen earlier said it would make use of these cars’ platforms to underpin the EVs made by the joint venture.

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That made a lot of sense; why develop an all new platform when you already have a good one, of the right size and for the right market? But as we can see now, JAC-Volkswagen didn’t just use the platform, but a whole car.

This is the JAC iEV7S, and it is exactly the same as the car on the patent drawings. Volkswagen’s designers changed the front and rear a bit to make it look more like a Seat, and they did a good job at that.

It even shows Seat’s recent design language, most notably at the ‘grille’, the lights, and the bumper. But it really is just a JAC.



Side profile comparison. JAC-Volkswagen above, JAC below.

The iEV7S is an interesting car. It costs only 119.500 yuan after subsidies. It is powered by an electric motor with 116 hp and 270 Nm, it has a range of 280 kilometers. All very impressive for the segment so it is understandable that Volkswagen was interested. But they should have tried harder to give it a more distinctive look; this is really just a badge-job.

The rear got the Seat-treatment too, with new lights and a new bumper, and that’s about it. Compare with iEV7S:

Spy shots confirm the overall looks. This test car even has the JAC wheels on it!



They did make an important change to the interior: they changed the shape of the air vents.

JAC iEV7S.

The sign at the new JAC-Volkswagen factory, with the S but without Seat. Read more about the fuzzy brand-naming issues in this earlier article.



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3 COMMENTS

  1. Not a bad move on VWs part as they have little to no lead time in terms of the auto world for engineering or even badge engineering a car to meet Chinas mandated quota…
    If this was going to be sold as a VW instead of a new brand they would have given it the full treatment…

  2. seat Arona????…. jajaja… no, no… I am sure of what I am saying, seat only change the bumpers… the car is 100%100 a JAC… it has been design in Italy

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