Shanghai (ZXZC)- Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ltd. (Changan) announced that its March sales slid 28.7% over a year ago to 139,737 units, while skyrocketed 385.8% compared to that of February, which was severely hit by the coronavirus spread.

Of those, the sales of homegrown vehicles reached 113,821 units, including 56,904 SUVs.

For the first quarter of 2020, the automaker sold 303,078 new vehicles, posting a year-on-year decrease of 32.1%.

The automaker said there were four models whose respective sales exceeded 10,000 units in March. With 18,424 units sold in total, the Changan CS75 series achieved an impressive growth of 35.2% from the previous year. The other three were the CS35, the EADO and the Changan Oushang X7 with respective sales volumes of 10,891 units, 10,432 units and 11,677 units.

Moreover, Changan also saw the sales volume of the CS55 SUVs amount to 7,946 units last month.

The company's NEV unit, Changan New Energy, sold 3,693 vehicles during the same period, and Changan's sales volume for overseas markets jumped 57.4% over a month ago to 6,287 units.

Due to the factors of coronavirus and Spring Festival holiday, most subsidiaries still suffered double-digit downturn over a year ago. Nevertheless, Hefei Changan still boasted a year-over-year surge of 132.7%, and its growth in year-to-date sales stood at 122.9%.

Two major joint ventures—Changan Ford and Changan Mazda—clocked 27.9% and 52.8% year-on-year slump in March respectively.

Changan is moving ahead with its efforts to intelligentize its products. It initiated the building of a drive-by-wire operation platform for Level 4 autonomous vehicles several days ago with RMB1 billion to be invested. The project is expected to be applied to volume production in 2025 with an annual output value of RMB4 billion.

Under the project, the Changan E-Rock is chosen to be the basic carrier in which technologies will be introduced, said a person with direct knowledge of the plan. The platform is designed to significantly improve the sensing range and accuracy of autonomous driving system, the operational capability of computing platform, as well as the performances of decision-making, planning and controlling for self-driving system. In addition, such novel services as fully automated parking and driverless car-hailing are considered as part of the blueprint.