SEAT is starting its expansion into China and will soon reach the Asian market

China is the largest automotive market in the world, and every brand wants a piece of that pie. Although many are already playing on that field, there are still some that have found the Chinese market difficult to crack and had to plan their landing on Asian soil. For SEAT, the moment has now arrived, and they are preparing to start making their presence felt in China, in partnership with JAC Volkswagen, the joint venture that unites the German brand with the Chinese company JAC.

To begin introducing the brand, the Chinese subsidiary is building an R&D and innovation centre in the city of Hefei, in Anhui province. Although work has already begun, this experimental plant will not be ready until 2021. This is important, because JAC Volkswagen was born as a way to explore the possibility of creating new electric vehicles and to work on the design and construction of all the elements needed to produce them, such as batteries, motors and the rest of the components.

The company intends to develop a plan to introduce electric vehicles into the Chinese market, but it has also received instructions to introduce SEAT into the country’s market. So within two or three years, it will be quite common to see some of the Spanish brand’s cars on Chinese streets and roads. That is, assuming that by then the SEAT Tarraco and the SEAT Ateca can also be seen, renamed as SV7 and SV5, respectively.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the union of JAC Volkswagen and SEAT will also begin working together to develop small electric vehicles. Furthermore, the facilities of Volkswagen in this Chinese city of 8 million inhabitants will serve as a testing ground for other types of technology, such as autonomous driving, in its various conceptions, such as shared electric cars, autonomous fleets and other modes of self-driving.

This technology could be very useful for SEAT, because it could be passed on to the Spanish brand and equip the cars sold in the Western market. We will soon see how this agreement, signed in Spain this week, develops and what we can expect from it.