Exclusive: Family Story of the HongQi L-Series Sedans

Dear readers, five days earlier we published the news about the Chinese luxury brand HongQi’s latest model – L5, which is aiming at competitors such as the Rolls-Royce Ghost. This news has gained lots of attention during the past few days, and we received large amount of inquries about this car.

So here we provide a full story of the HongQi L-series luxury sedan family.

Currently for the L-series there are three members: L5, L7 and L9. The smallest model L5 has civilian version (which is the model that current western medias are reporting about), but the L7 and L9 are only reserved for head of state at this moment.

The L9 is reserved for the officer level such as president, vice presidents and prime minister of China;

The L7 is reserved for member of standing committee of China;

The L5 can be used by province-level and ministry-level officers, or private customers.

You can buy a L5 if you have enough money does not mean many wealthy Chinese customers are willing to buy this car. The current tight anti-corruption monitoring and regulations in China, makes it “not comfortable” for people related to the government to purchase a L5 even it is purchased by his/her own money, not the government budget, because this will possibly trigger an audit and investigation of the person’s income source. For customer that is not working for the government, who are usually businessman, it will be awkward for him to ride in a typical politician car but he is actually not a politician. So I think it takes time for the market to distinguish the image of L5 from the rest of the models.

If you want to purchase a L5, it is completely custom-made. The base price is RMB 5,000,000, you can add any options or made any alternations you want, then you need to pay those costs on top of the 5 million RMB. FAW even send the engineering team on-site at the 2014 Beijing auto show, so people can ask them problems which are very technical.

Now let’s come back to the technical part. The major differences among L5/7/9 is the wheelbase. The L5 has a wheelbase of 135.2 inches, the L7 has 141.7 in, and the longest L9 is 153.5 inches.

Besides small cosmetics variation among these three models, one notable mechanical difference is the L9 is using a live-axle rear suspension, while the L5 and L7 are using the multi-link independent rear suspension.

The L5/7/9 are designed completely by FAW, only one major component is outsourced: the 6-speed automatic transmission is purchased from Aisin.

Below are photos of the L9:

The L9 has dual exhaust, instead of the quad-exhaust in L5 and L7.