Omoda: smart tech makes cars ‘luxury’ now, not engine performance

Gary Lan, UK boss of the Omoda Jaecoo outfit, reckons luxury isn’t about horses under bonnets or the smell of polished burr walnut anymore. It’s about gadgets, glowing things, and digitised comfort.

Fancier car brands might roll their quilted-leather armrests and shagpile car mats at that, but speaking to TopGear.com, Lan said: “Nowadays, especially the younger generation, they want a vehicle to be as smart as their phone, so we feel that making a car very smart is another way of luxury.”

Air purification for your hayfever? Check. Acoustic glass? Check. Fragrance patterns? Sure, why not. Once the domain of fancy six-figure saloons, now such features are available in cars costing less than £30k, alongside karaoke kit, of course.

Lan says dealer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. “Because the cars are so well specced and priced a segment below, customers have experienced features they never knew they needed. And once they’ve had them, it’s quite hard to go back.”

Omoda has two trim choices to keep things simple, but shrewdly, it's also offering 70,000 miles’ worth of RAC breakdown cover to build trust... and for those times you accidentally change the interface language into Turkish.

Smart enough to drive itself? Not yet. Lan says there’s more work to be done locally, highlighting roundabouts, potholes and poor data connectivity as critical obstacles to this development; “The UK has very unique road conditions so we don't feel ready. Plus, in the UK, the internet speed is different from other countries.”

And by different, we presume he means 'slower'. What do you reckon?