Questions, questions, questions.

Life of an automotive historian has its ups and downs. One of the interesting things is getting an answer to an old question. This can be great, it can give you a moment of great joy, as I showed you in an earlier article about the Wuqi products.

But each answer leads to a new question. In the Wuqi case, besides of the now identified jeep, an unknown car showed up. New questions: are there better photos, which engine, how many made etc.

I will ask here some questions which I have about early Shanghai products.

Shanghai started development of motor car production (as so many workshops) in 1958. The first Great Leap Forward product was the Fenghuang, over the years I collected several photos and full technical info.

The second Fenghuang model is a bigger mystery. It is a dual headlight product, in fact we have only one picture. Well, we have two, but it is actually one picture, an original and a photo-shopped copy. The background has been changed, one has a city background, the other a rural. Long ago  I have decided that the city background is fake. That leaves us with the car, same size or bigger than the first Fenghuang, and about the engine there are different speculations: a V8, 150hp; or a 6-cylinder 70hp made in Nanjing under the name CN070. That is all I know, a picture and questions.

A couple of years ago my Bulgarian friend Ivan Kolev mailed me a newspaper cutting of November 1959 from a Russian magazine named Automobile Transport. It shows a car we don’t know anything about: according the article the car is named Jiaotong (traffic, a name also in use for trucks from Shanghai). The interesting thing is the front: on the hood were two pigeons and on the grille two golden dragons displayed with luminous eyes (text from the magazine). When you receive information like this, there is always a moment that more about such a vehicle shows up. But about this Jiaotong, nothing, nothing, nothing. Ivan Kolev made this beautiful drawing of the car.

Another car from the same period is a Fenghuang serial model (which was the basis for the Shanghai SH760), but with a mysterious grille. It looks like an embossed iron plate, beautifully decorated. Is it really an iron plate? Could it also be a winter muffler embroidered very nicely. Who can tell?

And then the Shanghai SH761 parade car which is in the Shanghai Museum. A museum with a lot of prestige. Still questions: this car is totally different from the other remaining SH761 parade cars. At least five are still existing, that is quite a lot as the sources say that there were only 14 made. And suddenly there is the Shanghai museum version. Completely different front and rear, more SH760 parts (dashboard, engine) used than in the  remaining five. Underneath there is an old chassis. The front is in the Shanghai 1970s styling. Experts say the museum car is a replica. Why making a replica, which is no replica but in fact a new design? Did they have the remains of an original one, but no front and rear anymore (rotten?) so they had to improvise? Why not 100% copying one of the others?

During the cultural revolution, there were some proposed SH760 successors. Two of them , they were square, heavy and ugly, were named SH762 and SH763. Looking in my friend mr. Bai Guang’s photo collection in 2016, I found a third model. It must have been from the same series, but it never showed up until then. What was the designation, SH764?? And what about the engine, or the date when it was made?

The last one here is the Shanghai my friend mr. Lou Lin showed me last October 2017. It is a mix between the SH760 and the SH760A, but with round headlights. Never seen this one before. It is on the road, looks like a series product. Not even a Shanghai plate, but one from Jilin province. Was the car really made in series? How many were made? When, in the latter days of the SH760 career? The SH760 was replaced by the SH760A in 1974.

Of course, I always hope someone comes up with something that gives an answer to one of these questions. But I have been warned, behind every  answer a new question appears.

You can find all these photos, and a lot more, in my Shanghai book, available via my website, www.chinesecars.net.