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Voyah Chasing Light: A detailed review of the Chinese Luxury EV

12th July 2023, 14:18 by Ananth Iyer

In 2022, Dongfeng introduced its luxury brand called VOYAH. While the earlier brands did produce some decent vehicles, with this brand, they intend to target the customers of Luxury Vehicles like the Audi A6, BMW 7 series etc.

BHPian Ovais recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

What is called the Voyah Chasing Light for the rest of the world, is known as the Voyah Zhuiguang in the Chinese Domestic Market. Voyah is the luxury brand of the very popular vehicle manufacturer in China, the Dongfeng Motor Corporation. Dongfeng, which was founded in 1969 has been known to produce light trucks, heavy trucks, buses, small cars and what not. In its earlier years, it was known to produce heavy transportation vehicles only but in the last three decades, Dongfeng has not only partnered with foreign automobile companies such as Kia, Honda and Nissan to produce their vehicles in China, they have introduced their own vehicle brands namely, Venucia, Fengdu, Aeolus and Forthing. Today, it is one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in China which not only produces vehicles for the Chinese market, it also has a huge number of exports to other countries as well.

In 2022, Dongfeng introduced its luxury brand called VOYAH. While the earlier brands did produce some decent vehicles, with this brand, they intend to target the customers of Luxury Vehicles like the Audi A6, BMW 7 series etc. They started manufacturing with two vehicles, the Voyah Free and the Voyah Dreamer. I will be covering those vehicles at a later time as well but at this point in time, I got to explore the Voyah Chasing Light, which is known as Zhuiguang in China, and I’ll be sharing my findings here.

Let’s start with the exterior of the vehicle. When you first see the car, the styling and the size of the vehicle is what you notice. It has a sleek design, that starts from the front and is continued to the rear in a similar fashion. It is reminiscent of the name, Chasing Light.

The front has sleek headlights, incorporated into a slim fascia that has an LED light from corner to corner, converging into the Voyah logo right in the center, which itself also glows with LEDs.

Walking towards the rear, you will notice that this is quite a long vehicle, with the rear doors longer than the front ones, and a noticeably long wheelbase, you can tell how much legroom it would have, without even stepping into the vehicle. The design on the side generally follows clean lines with a matte silver design feature towards the lower end, that adds a little break to these lines.

You will also notice that has flush door handles that come out as soon as you unlock the car and retract back into the body as soon as you lock it.

In the rear, you also see LED taillights from corner to corner, as long flowing led lights is quite a norm in the design of the vehicles in China these days. While the LED tail lights are pretty eye-catching, I believe a slightly more minimalistic design of the lights would’ve been more appealing as there appears to be a lot going on in the design. You will also see VOYAH written in white glowing lettering in the center.

The front lights and the rear lights give you a light show when the car is locked or unlocked, which Voyah calls the Active Welcome Light Language. The lights glow in an animated manner and it looks quite cool!

Right above the taillights, you will notice that there is a small piece that appears to be separate from the trunk lid and you wonder what that is. This is actually a dynamic spoiler that the car raises or lowers depending the speed that you are driving it at. Is it a design gimmick or actually a functional spoiler, I’m not entirely sure but it does look pretty cool.

You will see that the car has a Panoramic Roof that covers pretty much the whole of the roof. It is a single piece of glass from the front to the back which allows for a smooth looking roof, with structural supports towards the middle, which is not visible in the glass from the outside but can be seen from the inside. The panoramic roof cannot be opened though if you wish to enjoy the nice weather.

The car comes with 20 inch Alloy Wheels as standard with 245/45-R20 Michelin Pilot Sport Tyres. There are two design options that you can choose from.

The car is All-Wheel Drive (AWD) with Permanent Magnetic Synchronous Electric Motors for both pairs of wheels that produce a combined power of 503Hp and 730Nm of Torque, which helps the car achieve 0-100 in 3.8 seconds which is a really quick time, even by supercar standards. It doesn’t have a multi-speed transmission, it has a direct drive transmission.

Let me remind you that this is a fully Electric Vehicle and it does not come with a Range Extender at this point in time. Voyah may introduce a version in the future that has a range extender but until they do, the users will have to make do with the range that the batteries offer. Speaking of the range, there are two battery options available. With both the options, the power of the vehicle remains the same, only the range is affected, and maybe the acceleration of the one with the bigger battery due to the increased weight.

One battery capacity is 82kWh, which the company claims will give you 580km of range, while the other one is 109kWh which the company claims will give you 730km of range. These numbers are calculated under the CLTC driving conditions, so the WLTC may fetch lower numbers. The batteries are liquid-cooled Ternary Lithium batteries.

The 82kWh variant is claimed to charge from 20% to 80% in 27 minutes when using a fast DC Charger while the 109kWh one is claimed to take 41 min using the same charger.