Youngman parts from IKCO, to build Lotus

Shanghai, July 21 (Gasgoo.com) Youngman Automobile Group Co., one of China's leading manufacturers of luxury buses and high-quality commercial trucks, has halted the sedan production project with Iranian IKCO Group and the Tai'an factory, which was scheduled to produce Iran sedans, is now to be used for making the British Lotus model, reports Beijing News today.

Before cooperation with UK automaker Lotus, Youngman has planned to introduce the Samand model under IKCO since the company signed agreement with IKCO early in 2006. Now that the Samand model is out of date and couldn’t cater to the market, Youngman finally gave up this project, said Cui Wei, vice president of Youngman last week.

An earlier report said that in this April, IKCO officials proposed to replace Samand with another model (code-named X12), which is partly similar to Peugeot 206, and IKCO would like to use on this car the Peugeot technology that the company had acquired from PSA. But Youngman denied this saying.

According to Cui, it is impossible for PSA, IKCO’s partner, to allow Youngman to produce Peugeot cars. Even worse is that Iran products are subject to restriction in global market, so Youngman ceased this project at last.