China’s bold attempt to crack the Aussie ute market
Is it a truck? Is it a car? Is it a ute? We’re not really sure and it seems the makers of this new ‘multi-truck’ aren’t really sure either. If anything, it excels in confusing.
In the minds of car makers, an impossible choice torments the average Australian consumer – should they buy an SUV, for its spacious, family-friendly qualities? Or sacrifice that comfort in favour of a practical dual-cab ute?
The perceived need to serve both markets has resulted in a series of turducken-like vehicles. Take GMC’s Yukon Denali. It’s a family car with so much guts it could tow an elephant. Conversely, Kia’s new dual-cab, the Tasman, is a workhorse with an interior cabin trying to emulate an SUV. Yet, despite these efforts, no car has truly managed to bridge the divide between family wagon and work-ready ute.
Enter Chinese car maker Deepal with its brand-new fully-electric E07 – or the “Multitruck” as they have nicknamed it. It’s a vehicle, they say, that can function as either a ute or an SUV without any compromises.
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In practical terms, it’s a car built around a boot that’s capable of a clever transformation. With the press of a button, the top completely opens – a bit like an enormous sunroof – and the tailgate folds flat. When the second row of seats are down, the boot has an enormous 1654 litres of space.
Deepal calls their Multitruck a segment-breaking first. It’s certainly unique in Australia. Still, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room – the E07 looks like a pretty unapologetic rip off of Tesla’s Cybertruck.
It’s not a crime to be inspired by another car maker’s design. But Deepal has made a Temu Cybertruck which somehow misses the point. It’s more than Tesla’s space management that makes the Cybertruck interesting. It also has an impressive 1134kg payload and 4990kg towing capacity. If you ignore the multiple cases where Cybertrucks have crashed and caught fire, they are a compelling car.
While Deepal have excelled in clever external design, the E07 can’t compete with Australia’s popular dual cab utes at work.
According to Deepal, the maximum payload for the boot area of the E07 is just 300kg. The towing capacity is equally underwhelming, at 1,500kg braked, and 750kg unbraked. Most tradies in the market for a work vehicle would call this a big compromise.
But, as a family car, this will likely be a crowd pleaser. The interior is sleek, modern and extremely comfortable. All seats in the front and back rows are fully adjustable, come with ventilation, heating, and massage functions. I personally recommend the rather intimate “buttocks massage” option.
Like many modern vehicles, the E07 has very few physical buttons, and is mostly controlled through a large central tablet. Unfortunately, the E07 has one of the most confusing unintuitive menu systems I have encountered. The massage function, for example, is on a secondary tab on the car’s climate control. Navigating there while driving is no safer than composing a sonnet via text message.
Furthermore, some of the menus don’t make grammatical sense. Under a passenger seat adjustment menu, a line of text reads, “With just one tap, the VIP passenger can access three convenient”. Three convenient what?
It might just be one absent noun, but it does make you wonder what else Deepal missed.
If you want to circumnavigate the menu system entirely, the E07 does respond to voice commands both in and out of the car. Personally, I don’t want to converse with the same machine that I’ve asked to massage my butt.
Those who do will likely find the system to be tedious. For example, while testing the voice command functionality outside the car, I asked for the boot to open.
“I’m sorry, this feature does not support voice operation outside the vehicle,” the E07 replied tartly.
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On further investigation, Deepal informed me that I’d used the wrong words. Instead of ‘open boot’, I should have used the much more intuitive phrase “one touch open”.
Personally, I haven’t the time to learn my car’s secret language.
I’ll just use the keys, thanks.
This isn’t a cheap car. The rear-wheel-drive model starts at about $64,000 before on-road costs, while the all-wheel-drive version kicks off at $73,000. For that price, you’d expect all these little issues to be ironed out.
But it’s not just the technology which feels lacking in polish. The floatiness of the E07’s suspension, coupled with the touchiness of the accelerator, made for a very queasy ride. As a passenger I was positively green with car sickness. In the driver’s seat, things only marginally improved.
The acceleration, at least, is undeniably blistering. The E07 might be big, but the all-wheel-drive variant still manages 0-100km/h in just under four seconds.
It’s just a shame the car feels so untethered to the road.
The tragedy of the Deepal’s E07 is that it’s very close to being a gripping car. It looks great inside and out, and is smarter with space than just about any other vehicle on the market. With time and refinement, the E07 could even become the segment breaker it aspires to be. But right now, it feels half-baked.
Originally published as China’s bold attempt to crack the Aussie ute market
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