HongQi L5: a Rolls-Royce Ghost competitor in China

In today’s Beijing auto show, FAW released its new flagship sedan: the HongQi L5.

The HongQi L5 has a wheelbase of 135.2-inch, length is 218.7 inches and weights over 3-ton.

The L5 will be propelled by a FAW-developed, 6.0L V12 naturally aspirated engine, which outputs around 402hp and 406 lb-ft of torque.

This V12 engine is named CA12GV, although the version installed on the HongQi L5 only has fuel port-injection, but the design of the cylinder head and intake manifold have already been optimized for direct-injection. It has CVVT on both the intake and exhaust valves This engine also has the cylinder deactivation technology, while running at lighter load it will automatically shut down 6 cylinders to save fuel.

Both the cylinder block and head are made with aluminum. Finite Element Method (FEM) are extensively used in the design of the cylinder block, reduce the weight but maitaining extremely high rigidity of the cylinder block at the same time. The total weight of the V12 engine is only 310 kg, and the cylinder block’s rigidity is 25% better than the Volkswagen W12 engine.

The coolant paths inside the engine are designed using the computation fluid dynamics (CFD) software, the difference of the coolant flow rate between the left and right cylinder bank is less than 1%.

The CA12GV engine runs so smooth that during the bench test, if you put a coin vertically on the intake manifold, the coin can keep standing still and will not fall.

The CA12GV engine has a extremely flat torque curve. At only 1000RPM, it can already output 82% of peak torque.

Inside the car, there will be virtually no buttons in the dash and center console, see the below photo: