Once Upon a Time in China
The company claims that the Chinese-English name ‘Aiways’ means ‘love is on the way.’ Perhaps in this pretentious way, Aiways demonstrates the export orientation of its business model. Now the company produces two Aiways U5 and U6 electric vehicles and has several more concepts. The history of the company gives an idea of how the automotive business in China is generally arranged and partly answers the question of where so many Chinese brands suddenly came from.
Aiways has recently shipped 60 Aiways U5 vehicles to Israel, the sixth batch of vehicles exported this year. Thus, to date, Aiways has shipped a total of more than 350 U5 models to Israel for general consumers. According to the company, the U5 is designed for the Israeli market with a sandwich battery that maintains optimal battery performance in harsh temperature conditions with an efficient thermal management system. The U5 offers a driving range of about 410 km (WLTP cycle) and an energy consumption of 13.8 kWh per 100 km. The SUV has acquired a synchronous motor with three permanent magnets with a maximum power of 150 kW and a maximum torque of 310 Nm. In addition, the U5 is equipped with the EyeQ4 autonomous driving chip provided by the Israeli tech company Mobileye, with AI-Pilot intelligent driving as well as AI-Parking intelligent parking system.
Assistant’s journey
Feng Changge served as an assistant judge in Henan Province for ten years. In 2002, he left his legal career and went into business. It seems that Chinese assistant judges are getting a good salary, one way or another, since Feng’s business was developing by leaps and bounds. For three years, Changge was engaged in either real estate or golf, but in any case, his success allowed him to open a BMW representative office in 2005, and after that he became a dealer for Lexus, Maserati, Bentley and Lincoln, first in the city of Zhengzhou, then throughout the country.
For the automotive business, Feng created a separate company, China Harmony Auto, which was added to the 2013 Hong Kong Stock Exchange List, thanks to which Feng raised quite a lot of money. With his automotive ambitions, Feng was lucky to live at a time, when the authorities stimulated the development and production of electric vehicles and provided various preferences to entrepreneurs who were ready to deal with electric cars. Feng created the China Harmony New Energy Auto (NE) fund, invested his own funds in it and attracted third-party investments. With this money, he bought a controlling stake in Green Field Motor Company (originally Zhejiang Green Field Motors Co Ltd, a state-owned automobile company) in 2015.
Back in 2014, Green Field demonstrated the BO90 electric car. Feng decided to obtain a license to manufacture this car, which would enable him to produce other models as well. NE invested 300 million RMB into licensing the car, but did not succeed. However, with the new asset in his portfolio, Feng made another investment fund, partnering Hon Hai Precision Engineering, better known as Foxconn, the iPhone maker, and Shenzhen Tencent Holding, the giant behind WeChat. The foundation was named Henan Harmony Futeng Internet & Intelligent Electric Vehicle New Energy Partnership and focused its financial and technological efforts, as the foundation’s name suggests, on the development of Internet-connected electric vehicles.
Birth of Aiways
With such solid support, Feng founded the Zhejiang Aichi Internet Intelligent Electric Vehicle Company, with which he stubbornly tried to obtain a license to manufacture the BO90. The licensing issue was key, since having the opportunity to produce this model, the company could produce others. But the production license was never obtained, and China Harmony Auto came into conflict with the founder, refusing to invest in the dubious model. As a result, China Harmony paid compensation to shareholders who believed in the Green Field project, and paid nothing to everyone else, so even Mr. Feng himself was deep in debt.
Founded in 2017, Aiways was created to become an international new energy smart car company. As of July 2021, the company exported 2,663 electric vehicles abroad.
Finally, China Harmony Auto Foundation came up with a productive idea to involve professionals in the organization of the automotive production, after which Fu Qiang (Sales Network Manager of FAW-Volkswagen and Mercedes China, General Director of Volvo Cars) and Gu Feng (former CFO of SAIC Motor) joined the project. These heavyweights in the automotive business formed a new company called Jiangxi Yiwei Automobile Manufacturing, co-founded by the local government of Shangzhao City in Jiangxi Province. The project was aimed at organizing the ‘smart production’ of electric vehicles, which again required a license.
Since Harmony Futeng failed to realize the idea of producing the BO90, the foundation ceased to exist. A new company, Aichi Automobile, was formed, involving the assets of Zhejiang Aichi Internet Intelligent Electric Vehicle. In 2018, Aichi unveiled its first electric car (Aiways U5 Ion) at the Beijing Auto Show. A year later, its test production began at the Shangzhao plant. However, the problem of a production license was never resolved. Aiways became the main brand of Aichi, the personification and the second, better known name of the company.
To finally secure a manufacturing license, Aiways invaded Jiangling Holding. It is a joint venture between Jiangling Motor Group and Changan that made JMC vehicles and had a joint venture with Ford. Aiways bought out 50% of the shares in this company, with the assets of JMC and Ford being taken out of Jiangling Holding. As a result, Aiways gained the Landwind brand and the long-awaited production license. In 2021, Aiways sold its stake in Jiangling Holding to the Jiangxi government, retaining only the production license. Thanks to this deal, the serial production of the Aiways U5 started in December 2019 and exports to Europe began immediately. In addition to the U5, Aiways is already producing the U6, which is also supplied to Europe.
Other projects
Aiways has been present in Europe since 2017, investing in various projects related to the development and production of electric vehicles. The main European partner is Gumpert Aiways Automobile GmbH, a project of Roland Gumpert (founder of the Apollo sports car project, lead engineer for Audi Quattro rally cars). With the support of the Chinese company, Gumpert created another RG Nathalie sports car with a capacity of 1200 hp, while working for Aiways as head of developing new electric vehicles.
Following France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Israel, Aiways will continue covering the foreign market.
Together with Blue World (Denmark), Aichi is building the fuel element production plant in China. At the same time, Aichi and Prologium are building solid-state battery production plant. Due to the fact that they are building a serial production plant, it can be assumed that the solid-state elements are almost ready, and if so, Aiways can be the first car manufacturer that uses these elements within the framework of serial production, and not as an experiment.
The U is not the only brand of Feng’s company, as prior to its liquidation, Harmony Futeng managed to create the NEV brand, which is currently being developed by Future Mobility Corporation (FMC) in Hong Kong, founded by former top managers of BMW, Nissan and Tesla. But once FMC was transformed into Byton Ltd, the new electromobile brand also started being called Byton. The same brand is supposed to be used to produce the electric vehicles of higher class than the U.
