China flexes muscles with new SUV in Japan

Could the 'Triumph' be a triumph?

TOKYO (RWN) - CMW, the largest automaker in China, has entered the Japanese market in a huge way: a new car and splashy $450 million advertising budget.

The move is seen as a direct challenge to Japanese automakers, who lobbied their government hard to keep the Chinese SUV out of the country. But officials worried about penalties from the WTO allowed the Chinese product in.

The 'Triumph' is a six-seat, high-efficiency, low emission vehicle powered by a combination of internal combustion engine and hydrogen distillate cells. When it's being used in optimal fashion, CMW officials said, it can get up to 95 miles per gallon.

What's expected to appeal to the Japanese consumer, though, is the styling. Unlike previous Chinese introductions into the market, the Triumph has razor edging on the side to give it a sleeker look, but manages to not look like the "gumdrops" so common in earlier CMW cars.

"Our engineers did an amazing job," said Wu-Hen Li, the president of CMW-Japan. "For the first time in our history, we did more than just market research. We sent a team in to live in Japan as the Japanese do, and we discovered many subtleties we never would have thought of.

"For instance, the soft drink cups Japanese convenience stores use are just a little too big for the factory-standard cup holders to securely hold. We made an adjustment there. On a more substantial scale, we were able to see firsthand the start-stop-start-stop driving that Japanese motorists have to do every day. We were able to translate that into an engineering change that lets the hydrogen distillate kick in a little earlier than it would in, say, a car you would drive in China."

If the Triumph is successful in the Japanese market, CMW will look to market it to the Bible Belt next.

"In a lot of ways, the Bible Belt is very similar to Japan," Wu-Hen said. "There's a real craving for efficient transportation there, for better gas mileage. It's for different reasons, of course, but the end result is the same: consumers want better value in their cars, and we think that we can deliver that."


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