Chinese automaker Geely wants to expand into North America and Europe within the next three years with a new compact SUV.
Speaking to Automotive News, two Geely executives say the SUV will go on sale in China in 2017. A year later, it will be sold in select European markets and will eventually be sold in North America.
“It’s an effort to burnish our brand before we bring out more mainstream gasoline-fueled cars to Europe and eventually to the U.S.,” one of the executives said. Another executive said Geely chairman Li Shufu wants to use the SUV to show the world the automaker “is ready to break into Europe and the U.S.”
In China, Geely will offer the SUV with a handful of powertrain options, including gasoline and plug-in hybrid variants. Initially, the SUV will be sold as a plug-in hybrid in eastern Europe, as well as Britain, Italy, Portugal and Spain come 2018, but exact timing for a North American launch hasn’t been detailed just yet.
Although we don’t know much about the SUV in question, we’ll likely see it debut in Geneva or Beijing next year, and it will be based on a new platform known as the Compact Modular Architecture (CMA), a new set of underpinnings currently being developed with Volvo.
