Dongfeng's Lantu brand appeared, and its first SUV will be produced in the third quarter of next year.

After more than 30 years of development, the automobile industry has become the pillar of Wuhan’s first industry. However, the arrival of the epidemic has pressed the pause button on this pillar industry.

As the economy recovers, the resumption of Wuhan’s automobile industry is imperative.

On the evening of July 29th, Dongfeng Motor announced its Voyah automobile brand strategy in Wuhan. This is equivalent to pressing the start button for Wuhan’s automobile industry. After nearly two years of waiting, Dongfeng Motor’s h business unit finally made the Voyah brand, which was announced some time ago, public.

Dongfeng’s positioning of Voyah is high-end intelligent electric vehicles. The English name for Voyah comes from Voyage. As for why Dongfeng launched the Voyah brand, the official stated that new energy is a strategic choice for the country.

As for why it is a high-end brand rather than a mid-range or low-end brand, Dongfeng believes that new energy users have increasingly higher requirements for product quality, reliability, and high-quality feel. Moreover, China is in an era of consumption upgrading, and users have an urgent demand for quality sustainable services, technological experiences, and high-quality products. Brand upgrading is the direction of future development in the automobile industry.

At the press conference, Voyah’s first concept car, i-Land, was officially released. Its appearance is not very exaggerated. It adopts a through-style light strip design on both the front and back, and the doors on both sides are designed as gull-wing doors. It remains to be seen how much of this style will be retained in future mass-produced cars.

Secondly, Voyah also released the ESSA native intelligent electric architecture, claiming that it will build high-end value in four dimensions: “design”, “intelligence”, “performance”, and “comfort.”Translate the Chinese Markdown text below into English Markdown text in a professional manner, retaining the HTML tags inside Markdown and only outputting the result.

Finally, Landtu has formulated a 3-5 year development plan, which will cover multiple segmented markets, including sedans, SUVs, MPVs, crossover vehicles, and high-performance cars. Starting from 2021, Landtu will launch no less than one new vehicle every year.

After the press conference, we interviewed Landtu’s CEO & CTO, Lu Fang.

Lu Fang said, “We provide various forms of energy for our cars, including pure electric and new generation plug-in hybrid power. In the future, all of our planned vehicles will have these two types of power sources. We hope that this multi-energy power combination can solve users’ anxieties about mileage. Starting from 2021, we will release one new vehicle every year, hoping to provide diversified services for our users.”

As for autonomous driving and triple-electric technology, Lu Fang also mentioned that Dongfeng is one of the earliest companies in China to engage in new energy and has been doing so for 19 years. Dongfeng has core resources in this area, making it a leader in triple-electric technology.

For L4 level autonomous driving, Dongfeng has conducted extensive research and has developed considerable technological expertise. We do have some things that we can show off. However, how we use this technology on a large-scale will depend on the national laws and regulations.

During the interview, some key points were also discussed, including the opening of Landtu’s first brand store at the end of October to early November, the launch of an SUV model (including pure electric and plug-in hybrid) in the third quarter of next year. This SUV will be a level lower than the Ideal ONE.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.