Great Wall prepares luxury sedan to take on Hongqi, Cadillac and Rolls-Royce

Great Wall Motor (GWM) has been trying to launch a new sedan brand for several years now; another attempt appears in the Chinese media as the ZX- brand, its debut model will be a luxury 5.5-meter sedan.

The GWM company is known primarily for its crossovers, SUVs and pickups, and yet in the first half of the 1990s it started production of illegal copies of Japanese sedans Nissan Cedric and Toyota Crown, creatively reinterpreting them and stylizing them as models of more prestigious brands — for example, Rolls-Royce.

In the 2000s, GWM had a passenger sub-brand Voleex, under which it produced inexpensive cars styled after Fiat, Honda, Scion and Toyota models, but in 2016 it left the market due to low demand and the reformatting of the Chinese car market — to large Chinese companies It became indecent to make illegal copies of foreign models, and at the same time, our own design and our own design school began to rapidly develop (however, it must be admitted that it developed and continues to develop thanks to the widespread involvement of Western specialists).

Salon Mecha Dragon, now Ora Sar

In 2018, GWM launched the Ora NEV brand, already well-known in Russia, which produces rounded hatchbacks, liftbacks and sedans vaguely reminiscent of Mini, VW Beetle and Porsche. The Ora brand also received the first model of the failed Salon brand — the angular Mecha Dragon electric sedan of the 2021 model, now called Ora Sar, but its sales have not yet begun.

Great Wall Chaopai/Futurist

The Great Wall Chaopai/Futurist sedan, similar to the Volga GAZ-21, presented in 2020 at the Beijing Motor Show, never became serial. The patent images of the “four-eyed” sedan under the Wey brand that flashed on the Internet two years ago also turned out to be a dummy — at least at the moment.

Sketch of the ZX sedan from GWM

Today, the Chinese magazine Autohome distributed a sketch of the debut model of the new subsidiary brand GWM, codenamed ZX (the commercial name will probably be different), it will produce prestigious passenger models in the rapidly growing NEV segment of the Chinese car market and stand in the internal corporate hierarchy one step above the Ora brand. The abbreviation NEV, remember, stands for New Energy Vehicle, it combines electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen vehicles.

Cadillac CT6 1/3 Rolls-Royce Ghost 2/3 Rolls-Royce Phantom 3/3

The debut model of the ZX brand will be an executive sedan with an overall length of about 5.5 m, in profile it resembles both the Cadillac CT6, Rolls-Royce Ghost and Rolls -Royce Phantom. There are no details about the technology yet.

In theory, the ZX brand can compete with the increasingly popular premium brand Hongqi from FAW, but it is unlikely to reach the level of charisma of Cadillac and Rolls-Royce, no matter how hard it tries to copy their style. However, we'll wait and see.