Qoros GQ3

Regardless of quality matters, wouldn’t be weird to see a minivan projected by Ferrari? A big pick-up truck designed by Citroën? Or a compact sedan made by Land Rover? Although most automakers now place their bets at participating in more categories, no one could ever prosper in all of them because each one has built its name around a particular market share. The Chinese cars could only became famous outside their homeland due to cheaper prices, but now there’s one brand trying to revert this situation.

This blog has already mentioned the Chinese automakers’ current attempt to follow the Japanese and Korean’s path of expanding their sales into the Western countries, using JAC Heyue A30’s article. The basic idea consists not only of taking cars which are really capable of pleasing these customers but also of bringing something extra, an exclusive appeal that could make people abandon the traditional brands in order to give those Chinese newcomers a try. They’ve already started to sell specially in America and Europe, but their vehicles always use the low-cost appeal. They came in several categories, but most of them are suitable only for the customers whose only concern is precisely the cheaper price, even though it’s tied up to questionable quality standards. However, these brands must’ve started to dislike this deal because, as a matter of fact, not every brand would like to see their products indirectly tagged as worse than their competitors. Today it would be very hard to only “erase” this reputation among the Western customers, so the Chinese decided to follow the opposite path: in order to mingle better and expand its sales, Chery is creating a luxury division. Yes, exactly like Honda did with Acura, Nissan with Infiniti and Toyota with Lexus around thirty years ago. And also as all of them there’s a Latin-like name: Qoros.

Mentioning those examples doesn’t leave much more to explain. Like GQ3, Qoros’ cars will have fancier designs with much bigger Western inspiration, which means aggressive designs combined to organic shapes, without deeper creases like the Japanese or other odd shapes such as what QQ uses. GQ3 is one of the first three vehicles planned to hit the streets in the next few years and it really represents an evolution from what is seen at Chery’s cars, but it isn’t hard to notice that Qoros still has where to evolve: details such as the big tail lights and the even bigger chrome line above the front grille really could’ve received a more elegant design. But the German-Chinese design reveals a very big interior, with plenty of space for five occupants and lots of luxury: the two-colored coating uses wooden details to give a higher-quality impression, but also hides that GQ3 was projected to achieve the perfect grade at the EuroNCAP tests. Not to mention the trim levels will be very high. Qoros plans to start selling GQ3 in China late 2013, with the European sales beginning a few months later. Besides this sedan, they will also offer a station wagon and a crossover. There are no technical specifications for GQ3 so far.