Chinese giant’s new-tech R Auto ES33 EV an Aussie chance

The Chinese automotive giant SAIC has revealed a new EV brand and its first model.

The brand is known as R Auto and the EV is the ES33 coupe SUV.

The announcement has more significance for Australia than most of the new Chinese EVs and brands that seem to be rolled out almost daily.

That’s because SAIC is already present here via its highly successful MG passenger car and LDV commercial vehicle line-ups.

MG sells Australia’s cheapest battery electric vehicle, the $43,990 drive-away ZS EV.

So there is a decent chance R Auto and/or the ES33 could be coming our way. It could feasibly arrive as an MG.

More details of the ES33 will be revealed at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 19, including the vehicle’s interior. Production is expected to kick off in 2022.

The ES33 rides on a new architecture dubbed ‘R-Tech high-energy intelligent body’ that SAIC says it’s invested $4 billion into.

SAIC says the architecture will include the ability to swap batteries and key hardware components, the use of high-power lidars that can spot objects up to 500 metres away and 4D imaging radars that can detect an object as small as a drink can at up to 140 metres.

In all, there are 33 sensors aboard the ES33, including laser radars, imaging radars and  22 cameras in and around the car.

The lidar sensors, built in conjunction with US company Luminar, are built into the roof of the ES33, while 5G-V2X mobile connectivity will allow for full Level Five autonomy, SAIC claims.

The computing power aboard the ES33 comes from chip maker NVIDIA. The DRIVE AGX Orin chip, which is purpose-designed to support high-level autonomous driving, features 17 billion transistors and can perform 200 trillion operations per second.

The ES33’s battery technology will feature two-way charging, cloud-based thermal management to provide ultra-high levels of battery safety and simplified battery access.

SAIC claims it will be possible to replace the battery of the ES33 in two minutes.

The ES33 is the latest in a series of EV models that have been previewed by SAIC. They include the tri-motor MG Marvel R, the MG Cyberster and the MG5 electric wagon.