IT LOOKS like a Smart city car and its name sounds Italian, but the Alpha Lujo is neither.

It is a Chinese-built electric car and its manufacturer plans to begin importing it into Australia in September to sell for as little as $18,000.

From next year it will include Australian parts and design expertise, and Alpha Lujo's chief executive, William Tien, hopes to eventually establish a workshop in Victoria to assemble cars made from parts shipped from China.

Mr Tien has contracted the former Holden design chief Phil Zmood to redesign the cars to local tastes. Mr Zmood designed Toranas in the 1970s, and some of the early Commodores.

The all-electric Alpha Lujo will initially consist of two models: the MyEV 118, which clearly derives its design ethic from the two-door Smart city car, and the MyEV 128, a four-door that looks a little like the now defunct Daewoo Matiz.

The MyEV 118 has a bank of 28, 12-volt batteries wedged under the back seat. Its electric motor makes a minuscule 15 kilowatts of power, and the top speed is 80km/h. It is expected it will travel 100 kilometres on a single charge, and take eight hours to fully replenish from a household 240-volt electric plug. At $25,000, the MyEV 128 model adds two doors and a more usable rear seat, and can travel up to 140 kilometres at a time.

Both models will available in manual and automatic.

The pair will be fitted with two front airbags and stability control, but miss out on life-saving side and curtain airbags.

Mr Tien said he expected the cars to perform well in Australian crash tests after they passed similar tests in China.

He said the emergence in the past five years of electric vehicle technology had created a great opportunity for smaller, low-volume car makers.

''The larger, well-known brands don't have any advantage compared with their many years of research and development, and sales of petrol vehicles,'' Mr Tien said. ''The playing field is very much level for competitor brands such as Alpha Lujo.''

He estimated it would cost motorists about $3 to fully recharge either car, or less than half the cost of driving an identically sized petrol-powered car for 100 kilometres.