American electric car startup Mullen Automotive has announced the unfreezing of the Chinese supercar Qiantu K50 localization program in the US, now it is called Mullen GT and will be also offered in an advanced version of the GTRS with an updated design and improved dynamic performance.
Mullen Automotive is one of the most murky and at the same time unsinkable American startups: it has existed since 2014, but has not yet released a single model, but only gives out promises to customers and investors. Founder David Micheri always exudes optimism and somehow miraculously finds the money to support his enterprise, which the American press treats with great skepticism.
Last April, the independent analytical company Hindenburg Research, which had already sunk several American startups (Nikola, Kandi America, Lordstown Motors), published a devastating investigation dedicated to Mullen, from which it follows that David Micheri is a fraudster who did not pay the promised money to the Chinese company Qiantu Motor, due to which the project to localize the Qiantu K50 electric supercar in the United States stalled .
Qiantu K50
Qiantu Motor, in turn, is also a rather murky company: it introduced its K50 supercar back in 2015 and allegedly sold it in China in the amount of 1000 units in 2018-2019, after which it sank to the bottom and surfaced from it last summer, when launched the Qiantu K20 junior electric sports car at a fabulously low price. It is impossible to know how many cars have been sold since then, the Chinese press has never seen them, the Qiantu Motor website was not working at the time of our publication.
Qiantu K50
Mullen partnered with Qiantu Motor to promote its cars in the US: in 2020, Mullen announced that the Qiantu K50 would enter the US market in 2021 as the Dragonfly K50 (Dragonfly means «dragonfly» in English). Years passed, and the Dragonfly K50 continued to be on the Mullen website in the status of coming soon, and the startup, meanwhile, introduced its own Five electric crossover in 2021, absorbed the unsuccessful startup Bollinger Motors in 2022 and announced the entry into the European market with an electric subcompact hatchback I- Go of Chinese origin.
Qiantu K50
On none of the announced projects, Mullen has not yet shown concrete results (cars sold), so it is not surprising that the startup's share price is near zero. Nevertheless, this week Mullen released a peppy press release about the resumption of cooperation with Qiantu Motor: it turns out that the conflict between the partners has lasted all this time (the dot.LA resource tells about it in detail), which is finally successfully resolved. Mullen has received exclusive rights to promote the Qiantu K50 in the Americas, supercars will be shipped from China to the US as kits, and final assembly is scheduled to take place in Mishawaka, Indiana.
Dragonfly name sent retired, now the Chinese supercar for America is called the Mullen GT, but its design and characteristics are the same: the twin-engine power plant allows you to accelerate to 60 mph (96.56 km/h) in 4.6 seconds, the maximum speed is limited at around 200 km/h, the power reserve on a single charge is 380 km according to the obsolete and, in addition, irrelevant for the US NEDC cycle. , aka Mullen GT, visa — Mullen GTRS
Together with the base Mullen GT, the American company also promises a cooler version of the Mullen GTRS with an updated design and improved technical characteristics: the Mullen GTRS can accelerate to 60 mph in 1.95 s, maximum speed lichen up to 322 km/h. There are no other details yet, as well as specific dates for the start of production and sales of the GT and GTRS models, Mullen only said that he would reengineer the original Qiantu K50 on his own.