Foxconn is best known for being the manufacturing brains behind Apple’s wildly successful iPhone, among other devices, and now it hopes to establish itself in the EV field too.
Overnight the company unveiled two electric cars and one electric bus under the Foxtron marque. These vehicles were developed, and will be built, in partnership with Yulon.
Foxtron is just the latest joint venture for Yulon, Taiwan’s largest car maker, which already manufactures cars in partnership with Nissan and Dongfeng, as well as its own Luxgen vehicles.
The Foxtron Model C crossover will likely be the joint venture’s volume model. Measuring 4.64 metres long, and riding on a 2.86m wheelbase, the Model C can seat up to seven people across three rows of seats.
Thanks, we presume, to the car’s flat underbody, the Model C has a coefficient of drag of just 0.27.
Foxtron claims the Model C can complete the 0-100km/h standard in 3.8 seconds, and will have a range of up to 700km on a fully charged battery.
With a body designed by Pininfarina, the Foxtron Model E will be the company’s flagship luxury sedan. It’s claimed to have up to 560kW, enabling it reel off the 0-100km/h run in 2.8 seconds. Range is said to be up to 750km.
In addition to this, the Model E reportedly has a rear passenger section designed to function as a mobile office with extensive personal device integration.
There’s also a facial recognition system for opening the doors, and “smart windows”.
Also unveiled overnight was the Foxtron Model T bus, which is claimed to have a range of around 400km and a top speed of 120km/h.
The bus is said to meet regulations for operation in Taiwan, and has already undergone strength testing and over 200,000km of endurance testing.
If all goes according to plan, the vehicles revealed today will go on sale in Taiwan from 2023.
It seems likely these cars will be renamed before going on sale given Ford effectively put the kibosh on Tesla’s plans to sell its mainstream electric sedan as the Model E, forcing the Californian automaker to use the name Model 3 instead.
Fisker Ocean
As part of its EV adventure, Foxconn is running along multiple paths: it will build its own cars, build cars for other companies, and provide a ready-to-go EV architecture for automakers to use and customise.
Earlier this year, Foxconn unveiled an “open” EV architecture that it will license out to other manufacturers. It will form the basis of the Fisker Ocean crossover, which will also be built by Foxtron.
More recently, Foxconn bought the Lordstown electric ute factory in Ohio. The plant was formerly owned by GM, and will be used by the Taiwanese tech giant as a manufacturing site for its own platform and vehicles, as well as pickup trucks designed by Lordstown.
