According to insiders, Chinese electric car startup Leapmotor may provide its platform for new Jetta models, a youth brand launched by Volkswagen in 2019
The German automaker's dependence on Chinese technology is growing: in July, Audi and SAIC agreed to jointly develop electric vehicles, and Volkswagen became an investor in electric vehicle startup Xpeng and will launch two new models for the Chinese market.
Yesterday, Chinese business publication Cailianshe reported that the German automaker, through a joint venture FAW-VW, is in talks with electric vehicle startup Leapmotor to buy its platform for its Jetta brand, aimed at a youth audience. There is no official confirmation of this information yet, but nevertheless, it was immediately picked up by the world's leading news agencies, because the trend is already obvious — VW management decided to rely on purchased Chinese platforms, and different ones, in order to diversify the risks.
Leapmotor (full name Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology) earlier this week introduced its third-generation, highly integrated modular platform Leap 3.0. Founded in 2015 by Chinese electronics engineer Zhu Jiangming, Leapmotor has been in the Chinese market for only its fourth year, and now, imagine, it already has a third-generation platform, and by 2025 it will be the fourth.
European car companies today are simply not able to operate at the same speed as the Chinese. What's more, the Volkswagen Group is not even keeping to its own development schedule due to problems that emerged last year in Cariad's IT division, which is developing a next-generation integrated operating system for all of the Group's brands. Due to the crisis at Cariad, Volkswagen Group Chairman Herbert Diess resigned last summer, and the life cycle of the obsolete MEB electric vehicle platform had to be extended. .jpg» />The Leap 3.0 platform is intended both for Leapmotor's own future electric vehicles and for sale to third-party automakers. As part of the presentation, it was announced that Leapmotor is negotiating with two foreign companies to provide them with the Leap 3.0 platform. It is now clear that one of these companies is Volkswagen.
Leapmotor itself makes chips based on Qualcomm Snapdragon cores for its platforms and offers several options for different computing power for both budget electric vehicles and premium ones that have a lot of entertainment equipment and electronic driver assistants on board, up to full autopilot. Leapmotor also has its own software that is updated over the air, thanks to which the new platform has a lower cost than competitors. The first carrier of the Leap 3.0 platform will be a model with a factory index B11 — Leapmotor will show it in September at the Munich Motor Show. Jetta, whose lineup today consists of «hydrocarbon» models on its own, Volkswagen platforms.
Meanwhile, there were rumors that Volkswagen wanted to launch another youth brand in China based on a joint venture bought out from JAC in Hefei City, Anhui Province, now called Volkswagen (Anhui). The first model of the new brand should be a clone of the Cupra Tavascan compact electric crossover.