LeTV plots its foray into the auto world with electric car

Leshi is now the second largest shareholder of Atieva, after Beijing Automotive, which holds 25.02 percent of Atieva.

Atieva is the design and engineering company for Tesla Roadster, Audi R8 eTron and Chevrolet Volt.

He was confident that Leshi's products would beat those from Tesla Motors.

Leshi's chairman and president Jia Yueting wrote in his Sina Weibo microblog last month: "We will build the best electric cars to solve the problems of air pollution and traffic jams in China."

The company said its electric vehicle would be priced much lower than those currently on the market, as vehicle distribution costs would be cut dramatically by using their Internet sales channel, rather than dealership showrooms.

Analysts suggested Leshi could be a new player in the Chinese car market. Xu Hao, an iResearch Group analyst, said that the "smart super electric vehicle" might use Tesla models as a benchmark.

"The electric supercar project is going in a direction with great prospects and Leshi is very likely to have a supercar company standing apart from the Le Telematics subsidiary company," he said.

Business beyond a car

Leshi said its "supercar" would use its self-developed Le Operating System, or LeOS.

The company said the wireless Internet cloud system would transform the electric vehicle into a smart mobile device capable of autonomous driving, automatic parking and intelligent navigating.

The in-car telematics system will not be limited to the company's own product or hardware and several choices will be created from the system, according to Jia.

International Data Corp China's Research Manager Wang Yue wrote on Jan 8 that the core value of an in-car telematics system is in the big data collected from cars. Each hour a car may generate tens of gigabytes of dynamic data to be uploaded to the cloud. Therefore cloud computing based big data analysis could give conventional carmakers immense space to play.

The three major in-car operating systems that are widely used are Windows, Linux and QNX, and Android is evolving as a more entertaining alternative.

Leshi gave no indication when the new car may be ready for release.

Beijing Automotive's e-car

Atieva is working on a fully-electric model that will be priced at about 500,000 yuan ($81,770) for Beijing Automotive.

Hu Enping, brand and public relations officer at the carmaker's subsidiary Beijing Electric Vehicle, or BJEV, noted he could not say if the model was related to the Leshi "supercar". He said BJEV started R&D on the new model early last year prior to Leshi's plans.

Hu said the BJEV car is expected to be "more advanced than Tesla models in technology with a driving range of further than 400 km.

The badge it will carry is still under consideration".