VW have never confirmed or denied their plans for a sub brand in the Chinese market, but road testing spy pictures cannot lie. The sub brand from FAW-VW is already thought to be Kai Li, a brand that will focus entirely on ‘new energy’ vehicles. Selling EV’s in China is a tough market, ask BYD, selling EV’s under an unknown brand is going to be an even harder task, but the government wants to see more EV’s making it through to production so that the State Grid takes notice and finally begins to install charging stations.

The most interesting thing about this round of spy shots is that we have finally learned the name of VW’s new brand, of course we knew it was called Kai Li in Chinese, but now the English name of Carely has been revealed. A good choice? Perhaps not.

The Kaili/Carely first model is based on the VW Bora, a new model that is currently China only and was developed via FAW and VW in response to both Shanghai VW and FAW-VW requesting their own self developed compact sedans, SH-VW received the Lavida, FAW-VW the Bora, they both share the same platform and use the same 1.6L (and previously 1.8L) as well as 1.4TSI engines.

What’s under the hood of the Carely? We have no idea other than its likely to be an electric motor paired to some batteries of some sort. VW have been very secretive when it comes to their EV tech for China.