Who is Deepal?

Songjiang, outside Shanghai, December 1862. The Qing empire has just lost two wars to gunboats and is fighting a third against its own rebels. A provincial official named Li Hongzhang takes over a temple, fills it with British machinery, hires a Scottish army surgeon called Halliday Macartney to run it, and starts making guns. He calls it the Shanghai Foreign Gun Bureau. That temple is where Changan, and therefore Deepal, says it began.¹²

Li is worth a sentence, because he is the reason the story starts where it does. He was the leading figure of what China later called the Self-Strengthening Movement: buy the foreigners' machines, learn their methods, and stop losing. The gun bureau moved to Suzhou within a year, then to Nanjing in 1865, where it grew into the Jinling Arsenal, the largest in the country. It armed the Qing against the French in the 1880s and the Japanese in the 1890s. It did not build a single vehicle for almost a century.¹²³

A gun factory learns to drive

In 1937 Japan bombed Shanghai and Nanjing, and the arsenal did what a lot of Chinese industry did that year: it packed up and went inland, up the Yangtze to Chongqing, the wartime capital. Renamed the 21st Arsenal, it became the biggest military plant in the country, and Changan's own history credits it with more than half the weapons and ammunition China used in the war. Chongqing is where the company has been ever since.²

The first vehicle came in 1958. The Changjiang Type 46 was a light utility vehicle built under state direction, and Changan calls it China's first jeep. It made 1,390 of them over five years and then stopped. That was the entire car business for the next two decades.¹²

The real start was 1984. Changan registered its name as a trademark, signed a technical agreement with Suzuki, and on 15 November that year the first Changan-badged minicars rolled off the line. Suzuki taught it to build small, cheap cars properly, and in 1993 the two set up a joint venture that put the Alto, Suzuki's tiny hatchback, on Chinese roads in huge numbers. Ford arrived as a partner in 2001 and Mazda followed. For most of the next thirty years, if you saw a Changan factory's work, it had someone else's badge on the nose.¹²⁴

That is how a state arsenal became one of China's four big state carmakers, alongside FAW, SAIC and Dongfeng. It never had a founder in the way XPENG has He Xiaopeng. It had a government and a city, and it took its time.¹⁵

Deep blue

In 2017 Changan announced what it called its third entrepreneurship, a plan to stop being a company that assembled other people's designs and start being one that led. Part of that was a dedicated new-energy division, set up in December 2017. Between 2020 and 2022 it was merged with an older electric subsidiary and reorganised as Changan New Energy Automobile Technology, with outside investors buying in so that, for a while, Changan itself held less than half of it.⁶⁷

The badge was already on the SL03's tailgate in Thailand before most people in Singapore had heard the name.

The badge came in April 2022. The Chinese name is Shenlan, which means deep blue, and the first car followed in July: the SL03, a low liftback saloon aimed straight at the Tesla Model 3 and sold, unusually, with three different ways of filling it up. A pure electric version, a range-extended version with a small petrol generator, and a hydrogen fuel-cell version that few people bought but that got the brand talked about. By December 2022 it was delivering more than 11,000 cars a month, which Changan says made it the fastest new-energy brand in China to reach that number.⁶⁷⁸

In March 2023 the division was spun out as a company in its own right, run by Deng Chenghao, and renamed Deepal. Changan kept 51 per cent. Three months later came the S7, an electric SUV launched at roughly half the price of a Model Y in China, which is the car sold here as the S07. A smaller SUV, the S05, followed in October 2024 and took more than 20,000 orders in its first month. In 2024 Deepal built close to a quarter of a million cars.⁶⁷⁹¹⁰

The shapes come from Italy. Changan opened a design centre in Turin in 2001, and the S07 was drawn there under a French designer, Bertrand Bach. That is why a Chongqing SUV has the shoulders of a Lamborghini Urus and the lighting of a mobile suit.¹¹¹²

The Mazda with a Deepal underneath

Here is the sentence to remember when someone asks whether Deepal is a real car company. The Mazda EZ-6, the electric saloon Mazda sells in China and, as the 6e, in Europe, is a Deepal SL03 with a Mazda body. The Mazda EZ-60 SUV is built the same way from the S07. Both are made by Changan Mazda in Nanjing, on Changan's EPA1 platform, with Changan's batteries and motors.⁸¹¹

For forty years the joint ventures worked one way: the foreign partner brought the car, the Chinese partner brought the factory. On Mazda's electric cars the direction has reversed. The Japanese badge is the part that was added afterwards.⁸¹¹

Rayong, and the rest of the world

Deepal's first stop outside China was Thailand, in November 2023, and it went well. By 2024 the S7 was the best-selling electric SUV in the country, and Changan decided the next step was not more ships but a factory.¹³¹⁴

It broke ground in Rayong, on the Eastern Seaboard south of Bangkok, in November 2023, and eighteen months later, on 16 May 2025, the first car came off the line: a right-hand-drive Deepal S05. It was also Changan's 28.59-millionth vehicle, a number that tells you how long the company has been doing this. The plant cost about ten billion baht, builds 100,000 cars a year to start, and by the end of 2025 was shipping S05s to Europe.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The rest of the map filled in around it. A brand launch in Germany in March 2025, a British arm, Australia, Indonesia with local assembly from December 2025, Malaysia through Bermaz, the group that sells Mazdas there. Changan as a whole sold 2.68 million vehicles in 2024, 735,000 of them electric or plug-in, and passed 2.9 million in 2025. Singapore is a very small dot on that map. It is on it because Thailand worked.^13141617

Second floor, Alexandra Road

The Singapore chapter starts with a familiar building. In December 2024 Premium Automobiles announced it had been appointed Deepal's dealer here, its third Chinese electric brand after XPENG and Zeekr. Premium had been Audi's Singapore distributor since 1999, and when Audi moved to selling direct in 2025, Premium kept its big site at 281 Alexandra Road and went looking for badges to fill it. XPENG took the ground floor. Deepal took the second, above it, with room for twelve cars, a cafe and a service centre in the basement.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰

The S07 was shown at the Singapore Motorshow in January 2025 and the showroom opened on 27 March, with the S07 priced from S$220,999 with COE, a five-year vehicle warranty and a ten-year battery warranty. Shen Xing Hua, who runs Changan's Southeast Asian business, said something at the opening that is worth keeping: the S07's chassis had been retuned for Singapore, and later models would be too. That is not a thing brands usually bother to do for a market this size.²⁰²¹

The smaller S05 came to the Motorshow in January 2026 and went on sale in June 2026 from S$187,999 with COE, the brand's first car aimed at Cat A. Somewhere along the way the operation started calling itself Changan Singapore, with Deepal as the model family, so you will see both names on the same building.²²²³

One more thing about the name. Everyone reads it as dee-PAL. The brand says dee-pull, as in people without the o. You will get it wrong at least once, and so did we.

What it is like to live with one

We have lived with the S07. It is a big, soft, striking SUV that rides like a sofa, with a head-up display good enough to replace the driver display entirely and a screen that swivels to face whoever sat down. It has no auto parking, it puts the aircon vents on a touchscreen, and the badge needs explaining to your neighbours. It also surprised us more than any car this year from a name we did not know.²⁴ The full S07 review has the scores.

That is the whole company in one car. It was built by a factory that made guns for the Qing court, jeeps for Mao's China, and Suzukis and Fords and Mazdas for everyone else, and that spent 160 years being very good at making other people's things. Deepal is what it made when it finally chose a name of its own. Deep blue. The colour of the sea it is now trying to cross.