Lifan gunning for 80,000 car sales in 08

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Chinese car manufactures are great at doing one thing (other than making cars on a budget) and thats tooting their own horn. Many a news story on China Car Times are based around sales goals for a certain year, perhaps many of these sales goals are inflated, actually, we shouldn’t say perhaps, we should say definatly.

It comes as a shock to us, that Lifan are aiming for a rather modest 80,000 car sales in 2008. Their current line up is limited to the Lifan 520 saloon, and the 520i, a cute hatchback version (above) that seems to be doing well with the Chinese motoring press.

To many Chinese, Lifan is a miracle company. Lifan started from pretty much nothing, and quickly grew into one of Chinas biggest companies, mainly through its motorbike manufacturing. Lifan has only recently turned its hand to car manufacturing, and they seem to be getting very good at it. In their first year of automotive sales, Lifan went for 50,000 car sales, and they achieved that in their first year. Since then, Lifan has entered several foreign car markets with success (Ethiopia, Russia, Iran, Egypt etc) To date in the overseas markets, Lifan has sold just shy of 25,000 vehicles, which is quite a bit for a relative new comer to the international market.

Over the next few years, Lifan aims to enter the European market (they already received five stars in the Russian crash test, and have the E-mark for Euro sales) and sell a yearly amount of 57,000 to 63,000 vehicles overseas.  Something which China Car Times can see happening very easily.

The comparisons between Lifan of 2007, and Honda of the 1970s is startling, Honda started out as a cheap motorbike manufacturer, before branching out into higher class motorbikes, and then eventually cars, and look where Honda are today, Lifan are one to watch, they are most definitely tomorrows Honda