It looks like we will at last see the presentation of a new car by NEVS. Yes it will be at CES Asia on June 7 in Shanghai.
First Chinese Car news outlets have begun to write small posts about it, but they seem to have missed a couple of things.
Regarding the looks of the car they point at a rather old picture of the 9-3 at the time they had to stop using the SAAB emblems. That was a rather ugly front grille and made the car rather ugly.
There has been more going on at NEVS than usual in the last months. At the end of February they announced their framework agreement with CATL regarding Battery supply, which seems to be a big deal as CTL has managed to increase their production capacities just to be second behind Tesla/Panasonic and leaving behind LG-Chem or Samsug SDI. I talked too NEVS, and that meant that the battery package had to be slightly reengineered, but all in all it was a good thing for NEVS. As a side note, CATL is since January owner of 22% of the shares of Valmet Automotive in Uusikaupunki. Yes, the Automotive world is quite small.
Last week NEVS announced its cooperation with ICONIQ, another e-Car brand from China. It looks like having an e-Car production license in China is not that bad. NEVS will produce the ICONIQ Seven, a Luxury Battery-Electric-MPV, that has been developed in Austria by Magna, designed in Italy by Studiotorino and has financial backing from the Arab Emirates by W Motors (the makers of the Lykan,the first Arab Supercar). The ICONIQ seven will be produced in the Tianjin factory starting from 2019 side by side with the NEVS 9-3. So it looks like at least one production facility from NEVS won’t stay idle.
On a side note, NEVS seems to now be willing to develop further cars on the Phoenix 1.0 platform (9-3) till 2020 when the first phoenix 3.0 will be launched. We’ll see!
But I wanted to talk about something different.
On my last post, I wrote about the new head of communication, Fredirk Fryklund, not being in Trollhättan during the Saab Car Museum Festival on the second weekend in June. So, why can I say so?
During the last weeks the guy in charge of the social media accounts at NEVS has been repeating that they soon will show to the public what they have been working on.
nevsofficial Sharing a photo from the Swedish Minister of Enterprise and Innovation Mikael Damberg @sverigesregering who paid NEVS a visit today. He got a tour of our test labs as well as a sneak-peak of what’s coming next… Don’t worry, we’ll share with the rest of you soon too.
From NEVS’ official instagram account.
I talked to somebody with a little bit more insight at NEVS, and he thought about the Auto Shanghai 2017, which will start on Friday, and media days are already ongoing, but after going through the floor plans, I wasn’t able to see NEVS anywhere.
Change in the management team of NEVS – New head of Communication & Public Affairs
Mikael Östlund will move on to a new assignment, as head of communication for The Swedish Association of Industrial Employers, leaving his position as NEVS’ Vice President Communication & Public Affairs.
Fredrik Fryklund is the new head of Communication & Public Affairs, and he will start his position at NEVS on May 2.
Yesterday one interesting article appeared on the regional site P4 Vest of the Swedish radio corporation.
It is known that Tesla is searching for a production facility in Europe to achieve their production targets of 500.000 cars in 2018.
Different countries seem to be in the list, Spain because of the Sun, the Netherlands, because Tesla has already an assembly facility there or Germany, because Tesla has lately agreed to buy a German manufacturing specialist.
The next step for NEVS to become a car manufacturer is done. NEVS has announced today with a press release that they have got one of those 10 precious production licenses for EVs in China.
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The Chinese government has today approved NEVS’ application to start production of electric vehicles in its manufacturing plant in Tianjin.
– I am very grateful for the approval we now have received for the electric vehicle production license. It is an extremely important milestone for NEVS, which is based on 70 years of Saab long history. It means that we can take the next step to realize our vision – to shape mobility for a more sustainable future, says Kai Johan Jiang, chairman of NEVS.
The electric vehicle production license approved by the Chinese National Development Reform Commission (NDRC) is required in order to manufacture electric vehicles in China. NEVS is the first joint venture company with investors from outside China that is granted a New Energy Passenger Vehicle Project investment approval by NDRC.
NEVS’ manufacturing plant in Tianjin is under construction and planned to be up and running at the end of 2017, with the capacity of 200 000 electric passenger vehicles yearly.
The electric car industry is growing rapidly in China. NEVS plan is to develop a product portfolio of electric vehicles and mobility services globally, with China as the first and most demanding market for the coming years. The immediate plan is to deliver 150 000 9-3 Sedan electric vehicles to the partner Panda New Energy, a new energy vehicle leasing company in China.
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After some talks with NEVS I’ve been told that we will see the NEVS 9-3 this year, but that production won’t start till the factory in Tianjin is ready, which is expected in the second half of the year.
In the mean time, the trials on the SAAB case have started in Sweden, but I’m sorry I don’t think that I could via ‘googletranslate’ give a correct version of whats happening.
The Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri (the Daily Industry) have today posted two positive and interesting articles on the car company from Trollhättan now known as Nevs. Considering how Saab was treated by Swedish media many times, this is really nice to see.
The first article “Planen som ska få Nevs på rull” (the plan that will get Nevs rolling) starts out explaining that the Saab branding on the Stallbacka plant is gone and the production has stopped, with another negative fiscal year to be expected for Nevs.
DI asks “how can Nevs employ 900 people and keep growing?”.
Today Nevs has 900 employees in Trollhättan, with 230 consultants as well. They’re still recruiting more people, mainly engineers within electronics and software. This year the personell cost is expected to reach 500 million SEK ($56 million USD) and it’s all currently funded by the owners of Nevs.
The new factory in Tianjin, China will be ready next year. In order to get the necessary license for EV car production in China, it will be a complete car plant. This factory will produce the Nevs 9-3, based on the Saab NG9-3. The Stallbacka plant will support the Chinese factory and the next generation of Nevs EV cars for Europe will be built in Trollhättan.
A couple of days after the news that NEVS will use its own brand instead of Saab, a number of Saab car enthusiasts were invited to a meeting with NEVS at the Stallbacka plant in Trollhättan. Among others, the chairmen of Svenska Saabklubben and Saab Turbo Club of Sweden were there, with the Saab Car Museum curator. NEVS held a presentation and showed the group around the plant.
A more throughly analysis/editorial from the chairman of Saabklubben will follow here at SaabsUnited soon, but for now we have a Q&A (questions & answers) with NEVS along with a large number of pictures from the meeting. These are questions from us and from the readers of SaabsUnited.
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