Cute! The Baojun Yep is GM’s new EV for China

Did you know that General Motors has been involved in a joint venture with Chinese firms SAIC and Wuling Motors since 2002, building budget cars under the Wuling and Baojun brands mostly for the Chinese market?

No? Well, you do now, not least because the newly unveiled Baojun Yep is the first car that you might actually want to buy over here in Europe.

Just look at it! It’s a teeny 3.3m long, three-door, four-seat SUV with uber-cute styling and a very decent sounding electric powertrain underneath. 

Okay it may only have one motor that drives the rear wheels with 67bhp and 103lb ft of torque. And it may only manage a top speed of 62mph, but it’s got a 28.1kWh battery and can apparently manage 188 miles on a single charge. Nice. Plus, it only weighs 1,006kg. 

And yet there’s literally all of the tech that you’d expect to find in a modern SUV. You get LED headlights, DC fast charging, cruise control, active safety systems and two 10.25-inch screens on the dash for the infotainment and dial display.

Plus, there’s one extra bit of tech that you might not expect – Baojun refers to it as “the industry’s first car-watch”, but essentially it’s a giant screen across the rear of the car that’s inspired by smartwatches and used to display things like messages, the time or just funky changeable graphics. 

And here’s the best bit. Prices for the Yep start at 79,800 Yuan in China, which equates to £9,025. What a bargain. And that isn’t a boggo spec version with nothing on it either. You get all the aforementioned tech, plus 15-inch wheels and a full leather interior that Baojun refers to as the ‘Joy Box’.

Yep, we’ll take one.