Zinoro 1E: Your face is not strange to me...

Calm down, don't be hasty. They are no longer looking at a badly executed Chinese copy of a European model… it really is a “real” BMW. Meet Zinoro 1E, the fake twin of the X1.

Those who are more aware of the phenomenon of counterfeiting in China may be tempted to immediately call the Zinoro 1E a blatant copy of the BMW X1, but it isn't. It is said that it is a kind of BMW in its own right, but with another logo. An absolute debut at the Guangzhou Auto Show, China International Motor Show.

This German-Chinese hybrid is born from a joint venture between BMW and its local brand Brilliance Auto, which together created Zinoro. A brand that will be BMW's standard bearer in China for the electric car segment. The brand says that it does not launch this model already thinking about the large sales volumes, but rather launches it with a view to being a first step in the establishment of the Zinoro brand as the reference in electric vehicles in China.

For the rest, a look at the photographs and the similarities between the Zinoro 1E and its occasional twin brother are all too obvious. The big difference is found under the «plates», where instead of a combustion engine we can find batteries and an electric motor, borrowed by the BMW i3, developing the same power as this one: 168hp and 250Nm of maximum torque.

According to the brand, the Zinoco E1 reaches a maximum speed of 130km/h and has a range of 150km at full load (it takes 7.5 hours to fully charge).