Car Design Review 4 highlights: Lou Tik, JAC

I’m pretty confident our latest EV is the best combination between quality and cost today, and not just among Chinese brands.

We launched our new 4.1m four-door, five-seat compact electric car, called the iEV6S, in 2016. Now it has a new battery pack we’re expecting to sell 2000 a month. It has an 87mph top speed with a 155-mile range, but drive at 40mph and that increases to 200 miles.

It’s bigger than most city electric cars and costs US$22,000. The Chevrolet Bolt, with a similar spec and able to travel maybe another 25 miles, costs $32,000. JAC and VW signed a memorandum of understanding last autumn that could see VW use the iEV6S as its global entry-level electric car platform. That’s why.

JAC has gone from selling possibly 200 vehicles a year before 1992 to selling 643,342 vehicles overall in 2016 [including 276,024 commercial vehicles].

Last year was also important for one of our ‘champion’ products – our entry-level S3 crossover – which has had a major facelift in May. It was already the number one in its segment but now sells roughly 25,000 cars per month. At the moment it’s just on sale in China but it’s coming to Italy too, probably some time in 2017.

In China it’s quite complicated. The market is divided into joint venture (JV) companies with foreign firms and local brands. They serve entirely different markets. Among local brands JAC is definitely mainstream. Among the whole market, we are a bit lower. JAC has made electric cars since 2005 and today we have more than 15 million kilometres of on-road records. Inside every electric car we sell there is a central processing unit (CPU) which sends notes to the ‘cloud’ so we are actually online-checking all our EVs.

This database provides a lot of information on how people use their cars. How many times do they charge? What percentage of the battery remains when they charge again? We have to fully understand how people use the car before we can really design our products to match. It’s about the right range for the battery pack, not oversized. With the correct kilowatt motor, you can then spend more on design, perhaps on a nicer infotainment system.

“We’re making electrification our key strength, because we really believe in the new energy powertrain. China is probably the biggest market for the electric vehicle, now and in the future. The markets are so big and wide. The government is pushing the technology and we are the one with the advantage. China is special: we have 20 cities with 15 million-plus populations and more than four cities with 25 million.

There are dramatic living and travelling conditions for the inhabitants you could not even imagine if you have never been there. JAC understands because we are from there. We understand the pain points, so we want to make products to focus on how to solve people’s day-in, day-out problems.

“Internet businesses always come from a user experience position. Looking back to what we – and BMW, Mercedes and other car brands – were doing, we were totally opposite. Those designers never met more than 50 end-users in their life. They all imagine they understand the user. We draw cars based on how we imagine the end-user will use the car. It’s maybe 50-60 percent correct, which means 40-50 percent incorrect.

The user may not actually feel that, but in my opinion, it’s wrong to make people buy something they don’t need or like, but have to pay for. So we’re working with IT companies to ask questions of up to 100,000 people. We don’t give sketch designs out straight away, just ideas and questions about function, space, colour, etcetera.

“We’re also looking at setting up local 3D-printed car manufacturing. Normally you make a manufacturing mistake and it lasts for five to six years. But with additive manufacturing, you can correct a mistake within three months.

Consumers could have a new car every six months. The platform can only change so much, but it will still offer a wider choice than anything on the market today. You simplify the assembly process, but that’s not the key, it’s standardising the installation methodology, like Lego. The clipping methodology is the same but the pieces can be any shape, circular, triangular, even irregular. That’s our idea.

“We’re working with one of the best providers of 3D printing technology in Europe. Our target is to have a pilot line capable of making 300 cars a year by the end of 2017 with a car-sharing business in Italy. There will be a standard model and then various extra plug-in interior parts and exterior patterns, and even one-off customisations too, for maybe €500 more.

“Finally, we have really good people here, including an ex-Maserati interior director and an ex-Alfa Romeo exterior designer. Why do they come? Every existing brand in Europe, whether it’s sexy or not, has a history, which means they have a brand ‘box’. But some designers don’t want to stay in that box. We are the ones without a box, creating our own history. To create something from nothing, that’s exciting.”

Car Design Review 4 contains the best concept and production cars of the year, as chosen by the world’s leading designers, trends, student work, and much more.

Lou Tik: Biography

Role: Global design president, JAC
Age/nationality: 38, Hong Kongese
Location: Turin, Italy
Education: Beijing Art & Design College, China
& Coventry University, UK