It appears that Jaguar Land Rover are not able to do anything about perhaps the most blatant automotive rip-off yet to roll off a Chinese production line.
As opposed to other Chinese copy cats that have been a comical mish-mash of design elements stolen from the original, the LandWind X7 bears a strikingly close resemblance to the Range Rover Evoque… a car that is also on sale in China.
After its public debut at the Guangzhou motor show last year, wide-eyed JLR officials laid an official complaint with the Chinese authorities, but that has come to naught and the X7 will carry on being produced without any sanction. Currently Chinese law has very little to say about copyright infringement.
We believe Land Rover will investigate legal channels over what it regards as intellectual copyright and will not make an official statement on the matter while it is pursuing these claims.
Speaking to Autocar magazine, JLR’s CEO Ralf Speth said, “We can’t do anything. I hope the Chinese customer at the end of the day sees the difference and selects the real product and not a copied one. We hope they generate a self-regulation process so that they can get rid of this kind of copy-paste way of working.”
The LandWind X7 is powered by a 140 kW/250 N.m 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine and comes with either a six-speed manual or eight-speed automatic gearbox. In China the X7 is roughly 65% cheaper than the Evoque.
Interestingly, LandWind has just launched its first car in South Africa, the X5 SUV.
