70 Years of Dongfeng Liuzhou: Why the Dual Focus on Trucks and MPVs?

June 7, Liuzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center. Just after the heavy rain, the air still carries the unique damp and fishy scent of the Liuxiang River's high-water season. The venue was packed with people: truck owners and their wives, overseas agents from Vietnam and Thailand clutching business card cases, and supply chain bosses from Liuzhou. The slogan hanging on the stage read "Twin Engines Lead, Wings Open a New Journey". A quick glance down at the audience made it clear: here operates a Southwest industrial city, the industrial chain foundation accumulated over 70 years.

At this year's June 7 Brand Day, Liuzhou Automobile formally unveiled the "725 · Double Leading" plan: commercial vehicles aim for 70,000 units and southern region leadership; passenger vehicles aim for 250,000 units, focusing on the MPV track; overseas target for 2030 is 155,000 units.

This is a goal so sober it borders on conservative. No big and comprehensive approach, no chasing all categories to set up shop. They stick firmly to their two strongest lines. For commercial vehicles, they present the T1 New Energy Platform, Hydrogen-Electric Heavy Truck Chenglong H7 PRO and Yiwei 5 Super Power Version, walking the path of "Hydrogen energy anchors the direction, pure electric consolidates the foundation". For passenger vehicles, Xinghai V9 continues to deeply penetrate the "structural gap" of the 200,000 RMB level home MPV—above, the premium space of GL8 and Denza, below the cramped compact MPVs. The demand in the middle of "large space + new energy + real 7-seats + price not too outrageous" is exactly what the value and space logic of Xinghai V9 has pinned down.

On the surface, this looks like a KPI. But if you put it back into Liuzhou Automobile's historical coordinate system—from water turbine pumps to Liujiang brand trucks, from medium-sized diesel vehicles to Chenglong flat-top trucks, from Fengxing Wuzhi to today's Xinghai V9 and Huawei Qiankun cooperation—you will gradually understand.

To understand today's Dongfeng Liuzhou Automobile, you must first return to 1954. That autumn, Liuzhou Agricultural Machinery Factory was established by the Liuxiang River. No one would associate this small agricultural machinery factory making water turbine pumps with "China's Automobile City". But fifteen years later in 1969, it developed Guangxi's first "Liujiang" brand cargo truck, ending Guangxi's history of only being able to repair cars but not manufacture them. Another ten years later, in 1979, it produced China's first medium-sized diesel cargo vehicle, filling a domestic gap.

I. The Seeds of 1954 Were Sown in the Agricultural Machinery Factory

Now flipping through Dongfeng Liuzhou's official chronology, the first line is written calmly: "Formerly Liuzhou Agricultural Machinery Factory, established on October 6, 1954."

But the information volume of this sentence is much larger than it appears. Liunong's main business back then was making water turbine pumps—an iron contraption used for water conservancy irrigation in Guangxi's hilly areas. The national main production base was in Liuzhou. Making water turbine pumps required cast iron, simple machine tools, sheet metal and assembly lines. All these things combined are essentially a primitive but complete metal processing capability. So when the Autonomous Region said in 1969 "Guangxi must make cars itself", Liunong was selected to team up with Liuzhou Machinery Factory to trial production. It wasn't luck—they had machine tools, casting, fitter teams. They lacked only drawings and engine matching.

On September 30, 1969, the first batch of 10 "Liujiang" brand 2.5-ton cargo trucks arrived in Nanning as a tribute for National Day. Guangxi ended its history of only being able to repair cars but not produce them. From then until 1980, Liuzhou Automobile accumulated production of Liujiang 130 model cars at over 7,000 units.

What this early experience left behind is far more valuable than the label "Guangxi's First Car": it shaped Liuzhou Automobile's underlying temperament into a factory that "manages processes starting from the metal material end". Later making commercial vehicles, things like body strength, frame fatigue, and welding processes, Liuzhou Automobile's engineers were naturally sensitive—because their predecessors touched inch by inch from the cracks in water turbine pump blades and truck longitudinal beams.

In 1981, joining Dongfeng Automotive Industrial Joint Company, Liujiang brand became Dongfeng brand, and Liuzhou Automobile gained larger platform resources and system input. 1991 was another watershed moment—the first flat-top diesel truck "Chenglong" in China was born in Liuzhou Automobile, and production and sales exceeded 10,000 in the same year. Restructured in 1997 as a limited liability company with Dongfeng holding 75% and Liuzhou City State-owned assets holding 25%, the name "Dongfeng Liuzhou Automobile Co., Ltd." is used to this day.

But the step that truly changed the trajectory of Liuzhou Automobile's fate was the 2001 launch of Fengxing Wuzhi—China's first domestically branded MPV. The significance of this is often underestimated. It wasn't simply "launching a passenger car product", but for the first time Liuzhou Automobile translated the chassis thinking, load-bearing capacity thinking, and durability standards of making commercial vehicles into a passenger carrying scenario. You could say it was pragmatic—who wouldn't utilize an existing platform? But you could also say it was genius—because it accidentally took a niche in a category no one had seriously defined yet, and occupied it for over twenty years.

II. Liuzhou's "Industrial Species Diversity" is Liuzhou Automobile's True Moat

Many analysts analyzing Liuzhou Automobile are used to locking the perspective on "Southern Pivot of the Dongfeng System" or "Little Brother Next to Wuling". But this framework is too small to hold the truth.

The power of Liuzhou lies in it being one of the very few cities nationwide that can sustain the three major heavy industries of automotive, steel, and construction machinery, and let them supply blood to each other. Among the 41 major industrial categories of the state, Liuzhou occupies 40. For the three pillars of automotive, steel, and machinery, Liuzhou Steel heads towards high-strength and ultra-high-strength steel, Liugong brings construction machinery hydraulics and transmissions to export level.

Translated into Liuzhou Automobile's daily language: you want cold-rolled high-strength steel, Liuzhou Steel gets it done within an hour's drive. You want the steering system, Nexteer Liuzhou Factory is in full operation in Liudong New District. You want battery matching, Gotion/Renew Power/Penghui have already landed. You want castings, stampings, seat skeletons, harnesses, axles—chain nodes can almost find acquaintances within the Liuzhou circle to quote.

This brings two direct consequences:

First, the cost structure is different. For the same configuration list, Liuzhou Automobile's BOM cost naturally has compression space—not by squeezing supplier profit margins, but by relying on short chains, close logistics, long cooperation years, and low trust costs. This is why Xinghai V9, a 5.2-meter class mid-to-large plug-in hybrid MPV, dares to start the trade-in threshold at 169,900. It's not losing money to make noise, the supply chain won't secretly bite you from behind.

Second, the friction in technical synergy is small. Commercial vehicle T1 platform making hydrogen-electric integrated modular architecture, making 400kW large hydrogen stacks and 75MPa hydrogen storage systems, making megawatt-level supercharging—placing these things in a city with only passenger car production lines might rely entirely on external procurement. But Liuzhou has Liugong's extreme condition validation culture, Liuzhou Steel's advanced materials, and user groups with decades of heavy load scenarios. The dialogue cost of the entire engineering language is extremely low.

A more long-term card is the Pinglu Canal. Once this canal connecting the Xijiang River and Beibu Gulf is fully navigable, Liuzhou's industrial products—complete vehicles, parts, steel—logistics paths to ASEAN markets will be completely rewritten. The cost advantage of river-sea intermodal transport plus RCEP tariff dividends, is like paving a physical runway for Liuzhou Automobile's ambition of "155,000 overseas units by 2030".

So Liuzhou Automobile's "Commercial and Passenger Co-existence" is not a strategic quadrant drawn by management at a meeting on some day. It is a Liuzhou indigenous industrial enterprise, wrapped around and fed by the three heavy industrial arteries (Steel, Machinery, Vehicle) of this city, naturally grown dual-line physique.

III. The Essence of "725": Not Radical, But Rarely Sober

Seeing through the base color, then looking back at "725 · Double Leading"—commercial vehicles 70,000, passenger vehicles 250,000, overseas 155,000—you will realize its biggest feature is precisely being non-greedy.

Commercial vehicles don't shout for national first place, locking southern region leadership. Using the T1 Hydrogen-Electric platform to walk a dual track of "pure electric making money now + hydrogen occupying space in the future", avoiding burning budget with Jiefang and Sinotruk in the Northern red ocean. Passenger vehicles don't spread pepper across all sedans and SUVs, concentrating fire on the MPV pit it has squatted in for over twenty years—from Wuzhi to M6/M7 to Xinghai series, Liuzhou Automobile has suffered losses and tasted sweetness in MPV matters, knowing its product definition sensitivity in this niche is no worse than anyone else. The 250,000 unit target means MPV must change from "one of the product lines" to "the only protagonist". This trade-off is rather a rare item in today's auto circle—most companies' instinct is to have many children and fight many battles. Liuzhou Automobile chooses to put eggs in a basket with a heating pad.

Deeper, this Liuzhou system has a hard-core temper in "Good Enough Philosophy": not chasing the most dazzling concepts, but must solidify reliability, maintainability, working condition adaptability, and total lifecycle cost. You ask truck owners running long distances why they recognize Chenglong, or ask Liugong equipment owners why they care about cheap parts—the voting logic of the commercial world is always "availability rate", not launch party applause. Liuzhou Automobile brought this logic into passenger vehicles.

And the cooperation of Huawei Qiankun Smart Driving—landing first on Xinghai V6 "People-friendly Large 6-seater"—essentially acknowledges one thing: Liuzhou Automobile's strength lies in manufacturing, chassis, space, and industrial chain cost control; shortcomings in software definition and smart driving algorithms. Rather than closing the door to make up for ten years of classes, better to directly connect a system that is already running. This is not shameful, this is knowing who you are.

Written in the end

In the autumn of 1954, in that agricultural machinery factory in Liuzhou's west suburbs, someone bent over in front of the sand mold of a water turbine impeller, probably wouldn't have thought that 70 years later this place would produce Guangxi's first car, China's first domestically branded MPV, and today a plug-in hybrid flagship with a comprehensive range of 1,300 kilometers.

But if you stand at the Liuxiang River bridgehead looking in both directions—north is Liuzhou Steel's furnace fire and Liugong's painting line, south is a row of complete vehicle factories in Liudong New District and the signs of over 300 supporting factories—you understand Liuzhou Automobile has never existed in isolation. It is this industrial city of Liuzhou after twisting its metal skeleton, mechanical nerves, and logistics blood vessels together, an organism grown out of it.

"Twin Engines" or "Commercial and Passenger Co-existence", these words are just labels pasted on it afterwards. What truly drives it is always that simple, non-stopping conveyor belt extending from the water turbine pump workshop.

As long as Liuzhou is still making steel, machinery, and parts, Liuzhou Automobile's cars will not be rootless trees. And an industrial ecosystem of a city is the line in all strategic plans that is the least likely to be rushed.

China's automotive market no longer lacks "New Force Narratives". Every month someone announces redefining mobility, subverting the industry, leading the era.

But sometimes what is truly worth noticing is like Liuzhou Automobile—rooted in an industrial city for 70 years, kneading the hard bones of commercial vehicles, the short chains of Liuzhou's industrial chain, and the long-termism of the MPV track together, then telling the market with a starting price of 160,000-170,000: a good-to-use big guy doesn't necessarily have to make you bankrupt.

This is not a romanticist "Old Factory Revival" story. This is an industrial system planted in the ground, participating in the next round of reshuffling in its own way.