Kaiyun’s petite plug-in pickup has big dreams
beijing — In the woods on the outskirts of Beijing, Wang Chao, the ambitious founder of Chinese startup Kaiyun Motors, is behind the wheel of a tiny electric-powered truck he helped design, zipping up and down bumpy terrain with a big smile on his face. The vehicle, he says, “will be as, if not more, successful” than Ford Motor Corp’s legendary F-150 pickup. But unlike the gas guzzler, the diminutive Pickman runs on electricity.
Wang’s little-known company has sold 5,000 of the battery-powered trucks across China since May and he says it has received more than 100,000 orders. With more than 200 companies racing to develop new-energy vehicles in the world’s most competitive autos market, Kaiyun is one of the few companies to reach the retail stage. It plans to sell a million vehicles over the next five years.
A lack of regulation has made China a bit like the Wild West when it comes to electric-vehicle production and funding, leading to a proliferation of cheap, poorly made models. Despite the fact there is currently no legal framework that allows low-speed EVs onto the roads, about a million are produced each year according to China’s Standardization Administration — far higher figure than the 340,471 road-legal electric vehicles produced in 2015.
Change, however, is afoot. The government said in October that it plans to regulate the industry, drawing up benchmarks that producers will be required to meet, or face closure. Legislation can then be formulated that will allow low-speed vehicles to be used on the roads.
“China is the best place to run an automaker especially an electric car maker,” said Wang, 32, from his small office in Beijing, about 400 kilometres south of the company’s headquarters in Xingtai, Hebei province. “There is so much demand that has not yet [been] met.”
Wang said he spent three years developing the Pickman, which sells for 23,800 yuan ($3,500) and can run up to 120 kilometres on a single charge. “Mini electric vehicles will be a key product going forward for people’s short-distance travel,” said Wang. “I am sure we can make Kaiyun as successful as Alibaba’s Alipay,” the most popular online payment system in China.
Development hasn’t been cheap. Kaiyun has invested about $300 million so far to keep production going and is talking to domestic and American investors for an initial financing round of up to $200 million, Wang said. He added that the company is also planning to set up an assembly line in a Southeast Asian country next year, without going into specifics.
Fuelled by dreams of becoming the next Tesla, or BYD Co — the Chinese electric vehicle maker backed by Warren Buffett that turns out a range of battery-powered and hybrid sedans, taxis and buses — the country’s startup producers are coming up with a wide range of electric vehicles and concept cars they hope will hit the jackpot, from low-power EVs to high-cost sports cars.
Chehejia, for one, plans to start selling a two-seater, whose two 10-kilogramme removable batteries can be carried into the home and charged with a regular household socket, by the end of next year, while at the other end of the market, Beijing CH-Auto Technology Co., one of China’s biggest homegrown automotive design firms, is producing a $106,000 electric roadster.
Electric carmaker WM Motor, founded by Volvo veteran Freeman Shen, was the first to reach the rare “unicorn” status in August when it raised $1 billion in an initial round of funding. The record was beaten a month later by Le Holdings Co — best known for its concept vehicle that drew comparisons to the Batmobile — with $1.08 billion secured for its electric sports car business.
At the more dubious end of the spectrum, five electric-vehicle makers were fined in September for scamming the state of about $150 million in funding. The most serious offender publicized, Gemsea Coach, a Shuzhou-based bus maker, faked documents claiming it had sold 1,131 new-energy vehicles when it hadn’t made a single one.
While Chinese ownership of new-energy vehicles quadrupled to 500,000 in 2015, alternative-energy vehicles still account for just 0.003 per cent of China’s entire vehicle population of 172 million.