Aion, Avatr, Voyah, Onvo, Deepal, Aito, Ora, Rising, Firefly. Unless tracking the Chinese auto industry is part of your job, the odds of matching these names to their parent companies are not good. That difficulty is the whole story here.
China’s electric vehicle industry has become genuinely formidable in engineering, battery chemistry, and software in the space of a decade, yet its branding seems to run through the same filter every time: sound futuristic, sound techy, and above all, sound like nothing that has existed before.
The result is a naming landscape that has become hard to navigate, even for people whose job is to navigate it.
The invented-word factory
The newest wave of Chinese EV brands seems to have a formula. Take a short root word, often English, sometimes a proper noun, strip a letter or two, then add a vowel-heavy suffix that reads as vaguely futuristic. Zeekr, spun out of Geely in 2021, is officially a blend of “Generation Z” and “geek,” according to the company’s own explanation of the name.
Avatr, the premium marque built by Changan and battery giant CATL, with Huawei supplying much of the software, borrows from “avatar” but drops the second A, presumably so nobody confuses it with a blue alien franchise. Voyah, Dongfeng’s premium EV subsidiary, nods toward “voyage.” GAC’s Aion sounds like it is reaching for “eon” or “ion,” depending on how generous the listener is feeling.
In isolation, these aren’t bad names. The problem shows up once twenty of them sit on the same page. Onvo and Ora. Deepal and Denza. Rising and Voyah. They blur into a single beige mass of syllables, interchangeable in exactly the way a brand name is not supposed to be.
One company, five names that all mean the same thing
The clearest example of how this happens is Huawei. Under its Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, Huawei has helped stand up five separate car brands with five different manufacturing partners: Aito with Seres, Luxeed with Chery, Stelato with BAIC, Maextro with JAC, and Shangjie with SAIC.
In Chinese, the family resemblance is intentional. Every one of those brands ends in the character ç•Ś (jie), meaning roughly “world” or “realm”: Wenjie, Zhijie, Xiangjie, Zunjie, Shangjie. For a domestic audience that reads the characters, the hierarchy is instantly legible.
Translate that system into English for export markets, and the coherence disappears. Aito, Luxeed, Stelato, Maextro, and Shangjie share no visible thread at all. They read like five unrelated startups rather than five tiers of a single alliance, which is the opposite of what the name was meant to convey. Anyone who did not already know all five were Huawei partnerships would have no way of guessing it from the English branding alone.
When the numbers take over
Model names present a parallel problem, and here the industry has largely given up on words altogether. Zeekr sells the 001, 007, and 009. Avatr sells the 06, 07, 11, and 12. Li Auto sells the L6, L7, L8, L9, and Mega. Nio sells the ES6, ES8, ET5, and ET7 under its core brand and has now added two sub-brands, Onvo for family SUVs and Firefly for compact city cars, to reach price points the main lineup could not reach.
Numbers scale cleanly across a fast-growing lineup, translate without effort into any language, and sidestep the trademark headaches that come with real words. What they do not do is build affection. Nobody names a pet after a Li Auto L8.
There is a defensible business logic behind the invented names too, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off as marketing chaos. Legacy Chinese automakers spinning up EV sub-brands are trying to solve a genuine problem: shedding an association with a decades-old, gasoline-powered parent name that says nothing about batteries, software, or the buyer they are chasing now.
A freshly invented name creates distance from that baggage almost overnight. It also clears global trademark searches far more easily than a real word does, since ordinary English and Chinese vocabulary is already claimed many times over across dozens of jurisdictions. An available, pronounceable, trademarkable word is scarce, and a short neologism of five or six letters is often the fastest route to owning one everywhere from Berlin to Bangkok at once.
Not every entrant has taken that route, which is worth noting before this starts to sound like an unavoidable cost of building EVs in China. Xiaomi entered the car business in 2024 carrying a brand name every phone buyer on the planet already recognized, and paired it with plain alphanumeric model names: the SU7 sedan and YU7 SUV. The naming chaos elsewhere in the industry is a choice born of circumstance, mostly automakers with no consumer-facing EV identity to lean on, rather than something baked into the market itself.
The cost shows up when a name meets a real market
The trouble is that speed of creation and strength of recall pull in opposite directions, and few sagas illustrate that better than Great Wall Motor’s short, strange run with the name Funky Cat. GWM launched the Ora Funky Cat in Europe in 2022 as a fashion-forward electric hatchback, and the name drew plenty of attention, much of it unflattering.
By late 2023, GWM had rebranded it as the Ora 03, folding it into a numbered system as part of a wider “One GWM” push for a single, cohesive master brand across Europe rather than a scattering of sub-brands. The company pointed to brand strength and, separately, a settled trademark dispute as reasons for the change. The trade press covered the whole episode with undisguised amusement, and the car itself was discontinued in the UK within a few years, regardless of what it was called.
Funky Cat was memorable. It turned out to be memorable for the wrong reasons, and no amount of naming cleverness could rescue a car struggling against tougher, cheaper European rivals. That is the tension sitting underneath this entire trend. A name has to do two contradictory jobs at once. It needs to be distinctive enough to clear trademark offices in dozens of countries and different enough from every rival racing to market at the same moment, while also landing well with an actual human being who has to say it out loud in a showroom, or defend it to a skeptical relative at dinner.
Our Take
This isn’t exactly a uniquely Chinese affliction. Western EV upstarts have run the same playbook for years. Polestar, Lucid, Rivian, Arrival, Canoo, and Fisker are all invented, vowel-forward names chasing the same futuristic register. What sets the Chinese wave apart is sheer volume. Dozens of brands are launching or sub-branding at once, frequently from the same parent company, and many are pushing into Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and beyond within a year or two of their domestic debut.
There are early signs some manufacturers have noticed. GWM folding Ora and Wey under one master brand is a quiet admission that fragmentation carries a cost. Expect more consolidation as Chinese automakers move on from the fast, cheap brand creation of the past five years toward the kind of deliberate brand architecture that Western and Japanese manufacturers spent decades building. Until then, a glossary is not a bad thing to keep close by.
Hillary started his automotive writing journey at HotCars, and has written for CarNewsChina, GlobalSUV, and many other top auto blogs.
He loves to read, play chess, and supports Liverpool during the weekends
