Haval: The Story Behind Great Wall Motor's SUV Marque

From its Hover roots and the breakout H6 to plants in Russia and Brazil, a look at how GWM's SUV brand became a global player.

Haval — written 哈弗 in Chinese — is the crossover and SUV specialist under Great Wall Motor, spun off as a standalone brand in March 2013 to become GWM's second marque after the original Great Wall name. Its roots trace to the 2005 Great Wall Hover CUV, one of the first compact SUVs from a domestic Chinese maker and a sign of the company's shift beyond pickups and rugged off-roaders toward urban designs. In September 2006, 500 of those CUVs were shipped to Italy, the first large-scale European export by a privately owned Chinese carmaker.

The pivotal model came in 2011: the H6, priced around 100,000 yuan, made Haval a household name in China. The brand tried Red and Blue Label sub-branding from 2017 before reverting to a single black logo in 2019, and launched the youth-oriented F5 and F7 in 2018. By 2018 it had topped China's SUV sales chart for nine straight years, and in January 2019 it built its 5-millionth vehicle, when GWM founder Wei Jianjun laid out a "5-2-1" plan targeting 2 million annual sales within five years. A new angular, all-caps logo followed in August 2022.

Haval now sells across dozens of markets and assembles vehicles abroad: it entered Australia in 2015 (68 dealers by February 2024), has built the F7 and H9 in Russia's Tula region since June 2019, and in August 2025 began producing the H6, H6 GT and H9 at a plant in São Paulo state, Brazil. Global sales peaked near 850,000 units in 2017 and stood at roughly 600,000 in 2023, with Russia emerging as a standout export market. Haval remains GWM's best-selling brand, ahead of Tank, Ora and Wey.