Love Plug-Ins, 100% Bare Carbon Fiber, and Mega-Boring Chinese Sedans? Here’s the Chery for You! [2014 Beijing Auto Show]

There are plenty of good things about carbon fiber and plug-in hybrid powertrains, but the big one is of course that the two technologies can lower fuel consumption. That said, we can’t think of a bigger waste of carbon fiber or a plug-in electric power train than putting the two together in a Chery Arrizo 7. (The Arrizo 7 is a family four-door that pulls from the Subaru and Ford mid-size sedan design oeuvres.) We dig that Chery left the carbon-fiber weave on full display, but couldn’t it have built a sports car or something out of the stuff?

We say, if you’re going to build a car out of carbon, using a bland, derivative Chinese sedan as the canvas is a pretty low-impact way of marketing your expertise, especially at a venue as large as the2014 Beijing auto show. As for the plug-in part, well, we can at least get behind a Chinese manufacturer looking to find ways to reduce fuel consumption and correlate pollution—if you’ve ever breathed the stuff Beijing calls air, you’re no doubt nodding your head.

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• Comparison Test: 2013 Ford Fusion Energi vs. 2014 Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid
• Instrumented Test: 2013 Tesla Model S
• First Drive: 2015 Honda Fit

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