One of the lesser known Chinese brands, Kaiyi, is now online on the main site. You may know it as Cowin, the budget brand spun off by Chery in 2014.
Not unlike Jetta, the brand that Volkswagen spun off from a model line in 2019, Cowin was tasked with selling obsolete Chery cast-offs, and Autocade had most of the main models already on the reference site.
There’s more about Cowin’s corporate make-up there, and tonight we completed the list of models sold by the marque between 2014 and 2022, when Chery reduced its holding in favour of the Yibin Municipal Government, now the majority shareholder.
In 2022, Cowin decided it would be Latinized as the more Chinese Kaiyi, although its Chinese name (凱翼 or 凯翼) remained the same. It had already changed course in 2020, when, faced with declining sales, it showed the Showjet, a small crossover on Tiggo tech with original styling. No more would it rely exclusively on hand-me-downs, though Kaiyi did inherit what had been the Cowin Xuandu (pictured at top), the resurrected Chery Arrizo 7, and the V7, which was really an old-tech JAC Ruifeng M3 van. Still, the Shiyue EV, the mid-sized Kunlun crossover (below), and the continuing Showjet are helping Kaiyi shed those cast-off roots.
