By: Tian Hui
Entering the era of intelligent electric vehicles, what you buy is not just a car, but actually space, just like a house.
What kind of house do you hope to have?
Big enough, comfortable enough, and versatile enough.
Isn’t that too greedy?
There will always be smart businesses that can anticipate your needs, and prepare products to satisfy your “greedy” desires. The Guangqi Aion Y, a compact intelligent electric car priced at 100,000 RMB, offers you such an “abnormal” space: a 4.4 meter long car, but with a 2.75 meter wheelbase. The interior can also be turned into various trendy spaces such as a 1.8 meter bed, a movie theater, KTV, etc.
This “space” can also walk intelligently. The Aion Y supports basic Level 2 automatic driving assistance functions such as adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning. With the help of high-precision maps, it can also perform 150-meter-long memory parking.
The era of reviewing cars is also coming to an end. The Electric Vehicle Observer conducted a “stay” experience with this “space”.
Exterior and Interior Design Focusing on Personalization
Personalization is competitiveness.
Personalized body colors are one of the most important car configurations for young consumers. The Aion Y provides many body colors for consumers to choose from. At the factory, six body colors can be selected, and 18 body modification colors are available.
Not only has there been a breakthrough in personalized factory colors, the Aion Y also provides consumers with the potential for personalized color modification.
In this test drive, the vehicles provided by Guangqi Aion were all models with personalized color modifications, which also provided consumers with ideas for future body color changes.
In addition to body colors, personalized colors are also specially designed for the front air flow diffuser located under the front bumper, the metal decorative plate on the C-pillar, the roofrack, and even the tire color.Compared with AION Y’s personalized efforts on appearance, its interior personalized efforts provide consumers with a better driving experience.
AION Y’s interior colors are also youthful and trendy, divided into two basic colors: No.1 Player dark interior and Lucky Time light interior, as well as personalized macaron colors.
In terms of interior material selection, the high-end version of AION Y’s seats feature leather punching design and splicing materials, providing a better riding experience through the mix of punching leather, fabric, and leather.
Through the personalized design of appearance and interior, AION Y is quite competitive in terms of appearance, but its trump card is not here, but in space.
Magic space is the largest in the same level
Based on GAC Aion’s GEP2.0 platform, AION Y has achieved excellent space performance, similar to its sibling, despite its body length of only 4410mm.
Although the car is only 4410mm long, AION Y has a wheelbase of 2750mm, and the proportion of wheelbase to body length is as high as 62.3%, resulting in excellent longitudinal interior space performance.
The longitudinal space of the rear seats of AION Y is extremely luxurious for adult males. During this test-drive process, all passengers were males taller than 1.75 meters. All of them praised the performance of the car’s rear-seat space. Even when the front driver’s seat was adjusted to a more rearward position, there was still more than one fist distance between the rear passengers’ legs.
Thanks to the advantages of the GEP2.0 pure electric platform with power battery flatness, the rear floor of AION Y is fully flat, which provides comfort for the middle passenger in the rear seat.
In terms of space, AION Y not only has a large space, but also has many magical ways of using space.
After removing the headrest, the backrest of the front seat of AION Y can be completely reclined backward and can be connected to the seat cushion of the rear seat, providing passengers with a comfortable riding space similar to a bed.
The magical transformation of the interior space provides consumers with many trendy play possibilities. With this magic, it enables passengers who are 1.78 meters tall to comfortably sit in AION Y, as tested on site.
For example, the interior can be arranged in a dressing mode, or set up as a movie-viewing mode, etc.
In terms of the trunk space, AION Y has decent customary space, but with a shorter depth. However, the car supports a 4/6 split folding of the rear seats, which allows the loading of long items such as skis and bicycles after folding them down.
In terms of details in space utilization, there is a large storage space below the shift lever, which can accommodate a women’s handbag or flat shoes for driving.
In front of the shift lever, there is a charging space for phones that supports wireless charging. Worth mentioning is that this position is designed with a ski-jump style similar to an aircraft carrier, which can prevent phones from sliding due to sudden braking.
Magazine Batteries Passed Pin Prick Test
AION Y has three versions of endurance mileage, namely 400 km, 500 km, and 600 km. The 400 km version adopts a lithium iron phosphate battery, while the 500 km and 600 km versions use the magzine battery, a ternary lithium battery specially designed by GAC AION for higher safety power. It is the first in the industry to achieve no ignition with pin prick on the whole package of ternary lithium batteries.
Technically, the magazineIn terms of battery, the electrolyte used in the magazine battery adopts a new additive to achieve the self-repair function of SEI film for the first time. When the electrolyte is heated to 120℃, it spontaneously polymerizes into a high-impedance polymer film on the surface of the active material, which can significantly reduce the heat generated by thermal runaway reaction.
In terms of battery materials, a special nano-encapsulation technology is used to improve the thermal stability of the ternary material, by varying the positive electrode materials used.
In terms of battery module structure, the introduction of thermal insulation design improves the safety of the magazine battery.
In the battery module, a thermal insulation safety cabin is constructed for the magazine battery, between the battery cells, through a mesh-like nano-porous insulation material and a high-temperature-resistant upper housing. It can ensure that the thermal runaway of lithium iron cells does not spread to neighboring cells.
The upper housing used to protect the power battery pack can withstand high temperatures up to 1400℃ to effectively protect the entire battery pack.
In terms of the battery pack, the magazine battery is designed with a 3D cooling system.
By combining a full-fitting liquid cooling system, a high-speed heat dissipation channel, and a high-precision heat conduction path, the cooling area can be increased by 40%, and the cooling efficiency by 30%. After thermal runaway occurs, it can effectively prevent heat from spreading.
Compared to traditional battery packs, the battery management system (BMS) of the magazine battery is upgraded to the latest generation of BMS chips. It can achieve 10 times-per-second all-weather data collection and performance is improved 100 times compared to the previous generation system. The system can achieve full coverage and respond promptly to abnormal power batteries.
Intelligent driving has surprises
At the test drive event, we test drove the AION Y on a small racetrack and on actual roads.
For AION Y, this racetrack, originally designed for kart racing, has problems such as sharp corners and short straight acceleration section.
Although the rear suspension of AION Y is a torsion beam and the overall tuning tends to be comfortable, its performance on this small racetrack is commendable.
During the cornering through the hairpin, the body tilt is not severe. When braking hard at the end of the high-speed section, AION Y can provide good braking ability. When accelerating out of the corner, the 135kW motor can provide good acceleration output. In the road test section, the intelligent driving assistance system of AION Y has surprises.
The AION Y 70 Enjoy Tech and AION Y 80 Enjoy Tech are equipped with Adigo 2.0 intelligent driving assistance system.
In terms of hardware, the AION Y adopts a front monocular camera, millimeter-wave radar, and a total of 12 ultrasonic radars. In terms of software, it supports high-level intelligent driving functions such as ICA intelligent cruise control, LKA lane keeping, and FAPA automatic parking.
In actual use, when driving on the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, the lane keeping assistance function of AION Y has a good experience.
Even in the face of heavy traffic flow, it still has good lane recognition ability. When setting the distance to the farthest, even if other vehicles cut in, AION Y can make a correct response and there is no difficulty in cutting in.
AION Y also supports optional intelligent parking and one-key parking functions. After choosing this function, the vehicle can be parked in or out of the parking space by the owner’s mobile phone operation.
AION Y will also provide a 150-meter ultra-long-distance memory parking function (HAVP) based on high-precision maps. This function needs to be selected by the owner and will be available to the owner in the future through OTA upgrades.
During normal driving, AION Y provides four modes for drivers to choose from, namely ECO, NORMAL, SPORT, and I-PEDAL.
After turning on I-PEDAL, the kinetic energy recovery mode is set to the strongest. Drivers can control the vehicle’s acceleration level only by pressing the accelerator pedal. Deeply stepping on the accelerator pedal will accelerate quickly, while releasing the pedal will enter the deceleration mode.
In actual road driving, the differences in power response between ECO and SPORT can be clearly felt, especially in the high-speed driving phase where SPORT has a better power response level, while ECO mode has a more average acceleration level during high-speed driving.
In terms of power response speed, the SPORT driving mode is more in line with the appetite of young Gen Z consumers.
The NORMAL driving mode is in a moderate state, and for consumers who pursue a simple driving experience, it is a good driving mode.
ECO mode has a slower power response in daily driving and is a good power-saving mode when the battery is low.
AION Y is not just trendy
Although AION Y hopes to attract the attention of young consumer groups, its super-large space and attention to detail and experience are also suitable for ordinary consumers.
In terms of technology, the AION Y’s central control entertainment screen adopts a 14.6-inch high-definition large screen.
AION Y’s in-car system supports entertainment apps such as QQ Music and Himalaya, which are popular among consumers. The system also supports trendy functions such as shooting videos on Douyin and singing karaoke, as well as the Baidu CarLife mobile phone connection function.
Compared with the youthful and trendy exterior and interior design, AION Y’s trendy in-car system is suitable for all consumers. Even families with children will not reject the entertaining content provided by the high-definition big screen.
Taking into account AION Y’s excellent rear seating space, magical space performance, rich entertainment content in the in-car system, and its higher safety performance with the pop-up battery, it is not difficult to see why AION Y has become a must-have item for ordinary consumers’ car purchase lists. For the younger generation of Z, this trendy vehicle type may be the biggest selling point of GAC Aion compared to other competitors.
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.