Great Wall Motors or Great Motoring Rip-Off?
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
Great Wall Motors, China’s largest privately owned company, is launching a gigantic offensive - probably the most aggressive onslaught out of all the Chinese automakers. GWM (because the whole thing is just too long to type out) wants to compete in the auto sector, not just the pickup marketplace. They’ve more than doubled plant capacity to 400,000 units, so they’re pretty serious by the looks of things. The first wave of new vehicles will be shown at Auto China, which includes three new models, the Cool Bear, Dazzle and Demon. Unfortunately, we’ve seen them all already.
I probably don’t need to tell you what each car was designed after; I’ll just match colours and descriptions to names. The Cool Bear is that green thing, powered by a 1.5-litre engine (The next-gen Scion xB). The Dazzle is the blue thing (Toyota Yaris combined with Scion xA). The Demon is the red one that looks like a Fiat Panda with the nose of the current Mitsubishi Outlander grafted on the front.
I’m sure “Copyright Infringement” is a phrase we’ll be hearing from Toyota and Fiat very shortly.