The Wuling Hong Guang MINI EV has been generating a surprising amount of interest outside of its home market of China – mostly thanks to strong sales driven by its ridiculously low sub-$5,000 price tag.
A YouTuber based out of China recently paid a visit to the GM-SAIC-Wuling plant where the Hong Guang MINI EV is built, giving us a better idea of how General Motors’ Chinese joint venture partner produces this innovative electric city car.
For those who may not be familiar with the Hong Guang MINI EV, it’s a small, four-seat electric city car that offers roughly 105.6 miles of driving range, or 170 kilometers. The single front-mounted electric motor produces 17.4 horsepower and 62.7 pound-feet of torque, helping it achieve a respectable top speed of 62 mph or 100 km/h.
Thanks to its simple and straightforward design, GM-SAIC-Wuling’s plant can build one Hong Guang MINI EV every minute. Production output is important, as the MINI EV has skyrocketed in popularity in recent months and is now among the best-selling EVs in all of China.
In addition to the assembly line, the MINI EV production facility also houses a battery testing area, where the automaker can validate the performance of the lithium battery packs before installing them in the vehicle, along with a wind tunnel and an outdoor test track.
This plant will soon begin building another variant of the Hong Guang MINI EV – the Macaron. The MINI EV Macaron is a slightly upgraded version of the standard model, featuring additional active safety features, LED headlamps, stylish vintage-look wheel covers, a more powerful 27-horsepower electric motor and a range of bright exterior colors developed by Pantone. The MINI EV Macaron is a bit more expensive than the standard model, priced from the equivalent of around $5,750 USD.
Check out the factory tour video embedded below.
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Comments
Thats a pretty cool little city commuter…
Great little car.
It took a lot of IP theft to make all of this happen for China!
No one cares about this communist death trap…
Neat little skate but it sure looks dangerous. I wouldn’t want to tangle with a bus or semi in it or even a Suburban.
They could just skip the middle man and toss it right in the dumpster at the end of the assembly line.
Coming soon, to a Buick dealer near you.
You might be right, but none of that junk will be coming to my driveway. srs.
No one here cares about gm’s Chinese factories. However, based on all the empty gm car lots I see around here everywhere, maybe that’s where gm is planning to build all their future cars.
Maybe gm CEO should think about doing something about the lack of production in AMERICAN gm factories instead of all this china BS.
mary “Antionette” barra only cares about falsely inflating lowercase gm stock so she can pawn of her stock options… she has absolutely no long-term vision for gm other than cashing out.
Agreed.
And to that one knucklehead on this site who constantly boasts about “how well” gm’s stock is doing, that doesn’t mean much to laid-off AMERICAN employees or gm’s former customers looking for a new vehicle to buy who are now shopping at Toyota and several other manufacturers who don’t seem to be having any problem keeping their showrooms stocked and their sales staffs busy.
I don’t give a rat’s patoot about “stock price” when gm lots all over the place are empty.
I don’t care either, but, to be fair, virtially all the the car lots are empty due to so many manufacturers putting their sourcing of computer chips into the hands of one source. That wasn’t GM dumb, it was industry-wide dumb.
Yes; very short-sighted for top management to use only one source for such a critical component, but that’s my point—gm management is going down the tubes.
The chip shortage is not due to some single source (in reality there are many) but to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, during which automobile production shrunk heavily while demand for and production of computer and especially of mobile devices soared in incredible heights. This took the parts which before the automobile industry had consumed.
Now, when the automobile industry is resuming, it faces a changed market for electronic chips.
Th