The big advantage Chery's newest brand says it has over other Chinese newcomers

Lepas may be an unknown name, but the incoming Chinese auto brand says it will be able to leverage the strengths of its parent company in a way other newcomers won't be able to.

Though it’ll sell its vehicles through a “totally independent sales network”, Lepas will be able to leverage the backend infrastructure of Chery Motor Australia.

“If you think about the broader group strategy, all of the infrastructure required to set up and operate a car business is here,” Chery Motor Australia chief operating officer Lucas Harris told CarExpert.

“Because selling cars is the straightforward part, right? It's the warranty, technical, parts, all those kinds of systems to integrate with dealers and customers. We have that infrastructure.

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“So, actually what we need is products and brands that can talk to customers that the other products and brands can't talk to. And we can do that much more easily than one random brand coming here on their own.

“Trying to do everything from zero to one, we've already got the zero to one part. We're now going to the one to 100 part, and that's where adding these extra brands trying to find new customers comes in.”

Lepas is launching here in October with a mid-size electric crossover SUV, the L6 EV , but will follow this up with smaller L4 and larger L8 and L9 SUVs through 2028, plus a small hatchback called the L2 in 2028.

It’ll have 40 dealers at launch, with plans to increase this number to 50 by the end of 2027.

However, Lepas says it’ll be able to use existing dealerships that sell Chery Group vehicles as “service agents”. The Chery brand’s dealership network alone consists of around 120 locations, which it says it expects to grow to around 150 by the end of 2027.

“We can then leverage that broader network that is filling in your particular, your smaller provincial, rural areas where we just turn them all to the service agents,” explained Mr Harris.

“The tooling is largely the same. The systems that they use to deal with us and talk to us for warranty and parts ordering will be the same.”

Lepas also says it will have strong parts supply in Australia from launch.

“So we work on bill of materials, which is a list of every part in that car. The launch threshold is 98 per cent bill of materials, physically in stock in the country for any of our models,” said Mr Harris.