Now you can afford to drive a high end Range Rover.
A Chinese carmaker has a huge hit in the new Landwind X7 SUV. According to Bloomberg.com, over 5,500 car buyers have already put down deposits on the $21,000 Landwind X7.
The only problem: the Landwind X7 is an exact replica of Range Rover’s best-selling Evoque. The Evoque’s sticker price starts at $62,000 and tops out at around $90,000 fully loaded.
Land Rover execs are concerned that American consumers will order the fancy bootleg Range Rovers to be shipped to the U.S. for the price of a Ford Fusion.
From Yahoo Finance:
The Chinese crossover first appeared in November 2014 at the Guangzhou Auto Show in southern China. At the show, Jaguar design director Ian Callum tweeted out photos of the X7 while wryly pointing out the similarities between the Landwind and the Evoque.
The Chinese Evoque facsimile appeared again in April at the Shanghai Auto Show, where it drew the ire of Jaguar Land Rover — a subsidiary of India’s Tata Group.
“I really regret that all of a sudden copy-paste is coming up again,” Jaguar Land Rover CEO Ralf Speth told the press at the Shanghai Auto Show. “That will not help the reputation of China, of Chinese industry at all.”