Chery isn’t shy about launching new sub-brands and we won’t be surprised if LEPAS is on the list for Malaysia.
Back in October 2024, Chery launched yet another brand. While many Chery sub-brands seem to borrow from European languages – Jaecoo gets is derived from the German “Jaeger” and “Cool” from English, Jetour is pronounced like it’s some French perfume. Well, this new brand is called Lepas… kinda like the Malay word for ‘after’ or ‘free’. Chery says that the name comes from a combination of ‘Leap’ and ‘Passion’, but we’d like to think that their success in Malaysia might have influenced the naming a little.
The first car launch for Lepas will be the Lepas 8, which looks to be somewhat related to the Chery Tiggo 8 Pro and Jaecoo J8. Will it get the same 254PS/390Nm of torque 2.0L turbo four cylinder as those other Chery SUVs or one of the newer Chery Super Hybrid systems instead? Lepas has a pretty large roster of Chery powertrains to choose from and the platform they’re building on is probably equipped to take any of them. Lepas will later expand its product line to include other models, likely the more compact and affordable SUVs.
What’s with the strategy of introducing as many brands as possible? Well, it’s unclear. In some cases, like in Jaecoo, Omoda and Chery, there seems to be some association where convenient but the brands Jaecoo and Omoda brands operate as one unit and the Chery brand operates as another. The work in the same building but on different floors. They sometimes put their sales numbers together but other times they keep the numbers separate. Jetour is a completely independent entity here that’s working with Berjaya for CKD.
Perhaps the strategy is to ensure some level of internal competition on the sales and marketing side while giving the engineering and production sites better economies of scale. Brands don’t cost that much to build up these days thanks to social media, and the Chinese have seen how the young and unknown Tesla came to build multiple times the brand equity of much older brands. They’re not quite as savvy as the West when it comes to branding, sure, but if you throw enough brand formulas one of them will eventually stick. There is also some level of wisdom in keeping your dealer network fragmented so that no one big player has any leverage. By keeping each brand separate, Chery manages to do just this.
