Great Wall Motors have today announced the imminent arrival of their latest workhorse dubbed the GWM Cannon Dual Cab.
Great Wall has disclosed the driveaway price of the entry-level 4X4 Dual Cab Cannon AT. The Chinese brand has confirmed that the fairly loaded model will start at $33,990 when it goes on sale in mid-November.
Exact specifications remain somewhat of a mystery, though, with no concrete information on tray size, type, GVM or other more affordable variants in the line-up. What we do know is that at that price, Great Wall will no longer be the cheapest option available.
Here’s the new Cannon – looks a bit like a Ranger from this angle.
Another lesser-known brand takes that place in the form of the Mahindra S10+. Still, the Great Wall Cannon will undercut the next most affordable Mitsubishi Triton by $1,750 and by the looks of things, the Great Wall comes as a pick-up, not a chassis.
Strangely, in New Zealand Great Wall has divulged the price of the Cannon 4×2, which it looks like will skip the Australian market, for now at least. We do know that there will be more expensive Cannons, including a Cannon-L and a Cannon-X that will presumably target the recreational off-road marketplace with more enthusiasm.
Frankly from the pictures we’ve seen, the new Cannon looks tough, somewhere between a Mazda BT-50, Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger, all without looking like a copyright infringement.
There’s something going on here – dare we say we quite like it.
The new vehicle will take over from the current Steed in the Australian range, and will aim to slide into the lower end gap left by the Isuzu D-Max’s push upmarket. We presume there will be a litany of options including single cab chassis grades from around $20,000, but that is yet to be confirmed.
Powering the Dual Cab Canon AT is a two-litre turbodiesel four-cylinder with claimed outputs of 120kW and 400Nm mated to a ZF eight-speed automatic transmission. Those numbers are low for the dual-cab game, especially in 2020, with most vehicles including the Hilux pushing their torque figures above 450Nm.
Still, that won’t automatically discount the Chinese newcomer from a sales success. Great Wall has made sure to load the new Dual Cab up with safety tech including seven airbags, lane-keep assist and AEB with pedestrian detection as standard.
A clever stepladder will aid bed access on certain models.
Other information suggests that a sizeable nine-inch touchscreen will take care of infotainment duties with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto standard. In the images, it looks to have split-screen capability, and be almost reminiscent of Volvo’s system. There also appears to be leather upholstery, and Great Wall claims best-in-class legroom.
Another innovative feature the marque touts is the inclusion of a mini stepladder at the rear, to make loading bulky items into the tray just that little bit easier – clever.
Underpinning the new Cannon is a suite of Bosch off-road systems which sounds promising indeed. The standard configuration of leaf-sprung rear suspension with an independent coil-sprung front axle is present.
Bosch sourced off-road systems sound promising.
The recipe sounds good on paper, and we look forward to finding out if Great Wall can pull off a true world-beating dual cab with a road report some time in November.