Yulon YLN701, Free China Review 1960/6, photo mobile01.com

Yulon (Yue Loong) Motor of Taiwan was founded in 1949. It started automobile manufacturing in 1953. In 1956 it made its first jeep. In 1960 the first motorcar, the YLN-701 (a licensed Datsun Bluebird 210) was introduced.

The first motor vehicle designed in Taiwan was the Feeling 101 in 1986, based on the Nissan Stanza.  

Yulon searched in the late 1980s for a Chinese partner. Efforts to let the Yulon Feeling 101 produce in Nanjing (by Yuejin) failed.
Yuejin (Nanjing Auto Works) was not capable of producing cars, the “three big – three small” politics forbid it and the Taiwanese government objected such cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan. Also due to the poor quality of the Feeling the Yuejin project was cancelled.

But some Yulon people shipped to China illegally molds, machinery and parts of the Yulon Sunny 303, the Taiwanese version of the Datsun B310 Sunny, made in Taiwan from 1981-1989.

When Yuejin refused to buy them they were sold to the Harbin Aircraft Manufacturing Company Automobile Design Institute of the Ministry of Aviation, the predecessor of Hafei Auto. A small numbers of cars were made in 1992 and 1993, first as HFJ7080D (to hide the fact that they had no approval), later as HFJ7130, then production was forbidden under the same “three big – three small” politics. The cars were equipped with a 1.3-litre Shenyang-Mitsubishi engine instead of the Nissan A12.

Here a big thanks to my friend Celsior Hsu who unearthed the story in March 2011.

Thanks to Celsiors article  and Weibo we can show you pictures of four cars.

Note the different front ends. I guess that there were only a dozen made.

The production line was sold to the Guangtong Automobile Works in Shaoguan, Guangdong, they made the vehicle as Guangtong GTQ5011. More about this car in Tycho’s story about Guangtong.

And Yulon? They continued to find ways to be involved in the (mainland) Chinese car industry. After the Hafei adventure, in the late 1990s Yulon set up a joint venture named Guangzhou Jing’an Yunbao Automobile, to produce Nissan cars under the Yunbao Fengshen name. Both my friends Tycho and Sam wrote about this company and its cars. In 2003 Yulon sold its part to Nissan. In 2011 Yulon started a joint-venture with Dongfeng for the production of Luxgen cars in China.

You can find more about these 1990s cars in my book Made in China. Lost small cars of the 1990s.