Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot: Heibao

Today in Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot (CCBTTF): Heibao. This was a brand owned by a company called Shandong Heibao, based in the great city of Weihai in Shandong Province.

Heibao (黑豹) means Black Panther. To make matters a bit more interesting: there were two Heibao brand, but it was also one.  There was Shandong Heibao, and there was Shenyang Heibao, based in the great city of Shenyang in Liaoning Province.

The latter was a joint venture between Shandong Heibao and  a company called Shenyang Shuangma, also based in Shenyang. Companies used the same ‘HB’ logo.

Designations are a bit wuzzy. Originally, Shandong Heibao used ‘HB’ and Shenyang Fusang Heibao used ‘SM’. But later on, cars made by Shandong Heibao used both the HB and SM designation.

After the signing of the joint venture with Shenyang Heibao, a new company was established: Shandong Heibao Group. This group owned Shandong Heibao & 50% of the joint venture.

For a short while Shandong Heibao also contract-manufactured a small sedan for another Shandong-based car company called Jinan Lubin Automobile Factory. This car was sold under the Lubin brand with designation JLB.

In 2005, the Shenyang Fusang Heibao was approached by air conditioning maker AUX to manufacture cars under the AUX brand. At that moment the Shenyang Heibao brand disappeared. Not much later, the AUX car  adventure ended as well, under rather murky circumstances.

Heibao Auto still exists today. They are now part of BAW. Lubin is still alive too, they make small electric cars based on a Suzuki Alto clone and electric-car conversions based on other small cars. Now on to….

The Cars

Starting with the vehicles made by:

Shandong Wendeng Heibao

Heibao HB1005

The o.5 ton Heibao HB1005 debuted in 1990, and it is the first Heibao-branded vehicle we know about. It is a little blue beauty with steel wheels and a two-door cabin. It was classified as a low-speed farming transport vehicle.

Design-wise it was based on the eight-generation Suzuki Carry.  In those somewhat wild car making days it was not always clear how Chinese car makers got their hands on foreign designs. Suzuki officially sold license for local production to several Chinese companies. Some of these companies then re-sold the designs to yet more Chinese companies. Besides that, there were also companies that simply copied the design.

Heibao HB1205/HB1205W/HB1605W

The year 1996, which incidentally was the first year that I traveled to China, the Heibao HB1205 debuted. Paint was a bit darker blue now, and it had a four-door cabin.

A bit later on, the 2-door HB1005 was renamed the HB1205, and the 4-door HB1205 was renamed HB1205W.

In that same year the company welcomes a very high visitor. President and General Secretary Jiang Zemin visited the Heibao factory with a sizable delegation from Beijing. Jiang, wearing a hat and a long gray coat, seems interested in the little blue trucks. It was a rainy day and two aides can be seen protecting the president from the wet stuff with their umbrellas.

A factory photo photo-shop of the Heibao HB1205, with the vehicle standing on a white road in front of a flowery field.

The same year again the company started making all sorts of variants based on their existing mini trucks, as every Chinese company is wont to do. The more variants the better; that is what they believe. There is a minivan, a minibus, and a mini delivery van.

A very nice HB1205W in red, a HB1205 2-door in green, and the odd HB1005X minibus.

A HB1205 in action on a market in Shandong. Yellow commercial-vehicles license plate. Dark blue paint. Small Heibao badge on the grille.

The Heibao factory around 1995. It is clearly a real manufacturing operations, not just assembly.

All of them should have been red!

The mini trucks were exported as well. To Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Rolling off the line!

A beautiful Heibao HB1605W I saw in Weihai in Shandong Province in 2011.

Heibao SM1010

The SM1010 marks the first time the SM designation was used on a Shandong Heibao truck. It was an updated variant of the HB1205, with a more modern cabin, a new grille, gold colored wheel hubs, and colorful decals on the doors.

My colleague Erik saw this SM1010 in Shandong, with dusty wheels and a very flashy decal on the door.

Lots of stuff going on here. Heibao in Latin script, in pink yellow. The SM1010 designation. The Heibao logo, and on the right of that a Chinese text saying Heibao pickup truck – small super man. Nice slogan.

Other colors than blue are very rare for Heibao. Here is a white gray car with a black decal.

Heibao SM1010W

The Heibao SM1010W was the four-door variant of the SM1010.

Heibao HB1605

The Heibao HB1605 seems very similar to the SM1010W, but it has wider tires up front and dubble tires at the back. Perhaps a 4WD version. Many similar Chinese mini-truck makers made 4WD versions of their trucks, which were used on farms.

A rusty and dusty Heibao HB1605, note the double tires, with yet another decal on the door. Heibao had many, many, different decals.

Heibao HB1010/HB1023

The great year 2003, which also was the year that I moved to China to live there, saw the debut of the HB1010/HB1023. It was a much larger four-door truck with four-wheel drive and very flashy stickers, showing a blue black panther, roaring!

They also had another panther sticker, running it seems, in gold.

Heibao HB1030

The 2008 Heibao HB1030 was a modernized variant of the HB1010/HB1023.

And finally, in 2009, we welcome the Heibao HB1035. This is almost a small truck instead of a mini truck. The year 2009 is also the limit of this website, where history ends and the present day begins. Lie I said above, Heibao continues making small trucks until today. Now, we go back a bit in time to Lubin:

Lubin JLB1010

The 1998 ‘Lubin’ was contract-manufactured for Jinan Lubin Automobile Factory.  There were two versions: the Lubin JLB1010KH passenger car and the JLB5010KH police car. Sadly I only have one factory picture of the passenger-car variant. The Lubin was based on the Tianjin Xiali sedan, but with different bumpers, a new grille, and a new rear spoiler. Many Chinese car makers of that time sold creations based on the Xiali-series.

Lubin logo.

Happily, we have all the specifications of the Lubin. Size: 4250/1615/1385, with a 2340 wheelbase, which is all near-identical to the Xiali. Engine was the same too: a 0.993 liter 3-cylinder petrol unit with 52 hp. Top speed was 135 km/h and fuel consumption was 5 liter per 100 kilometers.

We don’t know how many of these were made, but the lack of any other images indicates they didn’t make many.

Shenyang Heibao

Now it is time to move on the cars made by the joint venture. They were different than the Shandong cars. Much more car-like and even more variants. Design was pretty nice too. Their most famous car was the:

Lucky Day

Lucky Day (吉日) is a great name for a car. Designation was SM6470. It was a body-on-frame SUV with up to seven seats! The base design was very similar to cars made by so many other small Chinese automakers at the time.

In fact, most bodies and chassis came from the same set of suppliers. All car makers had to do was design the front and rear, the wheels, the mirrors, and add their own badges. This thus, was more of an assembly operation than real manufacturing.

Shenyang Fusang Heibao did a fine job, with a distinctive grille and a bright blue badge. The indicators however are too large and a bit of a distraction. I do really like the wheel design, sporty five-spoke alloys with big chromed bolts. The Lucky Day debuted in 2001.

The Lucky Day was powered by a 2.2 liter four-cylinder petrol engine sourced from Shenyang-Mitsubishi, the Chinese-Japanese engine-making joint venture that powered almost every small Chinese carmaker in those days.

The joint venture still exists, and continues to supply engine to dozens of automakers. They are the unsung hero of car making in China and deserve more praise. Shenyang-Mitsubishi waw formed in 1997 and started semi-knockdown production in 1998. Full local production started in 2000, just in time for the Heibao Lucky Day.

In the Lucky Day, output of the 2.2 liter engine was 102 horsepower. All power went to the rear wheels via a 5-speed manual transmission. There was no 4×4 option. Size: 4660/1690/1690, 2850.

My colleague Erik met a few of these great machines in period. This is a silver example in Guangdong Province.

A fully loaded Lucky Day at a car market in Beijing, also photographed by Erik. The bull bar, fog lights, side steps, and rood rack were all factory extras.

A dark red car with darkened rear windows.

Note the English-language Lucky Day script above the license plate.

Eric’s pictures again. This is a more basic model without the side steps, but they all had a sort of roof spoiler neatly integrated in the trunk door.

On the left: Shenyang Heibao. On the right the full designation SM6470ME.

Heibao Lucky Day Upgrade 1

In 2003 the Lucky Day got an upgrade. The grille was new, with horizontal bars and a thicker bar on top. It got new decals too; yellow and blue lines, resembling a beach. Price ranged from 53.800 yuan to 86.000 yuan. It was such a clean looking car, especially in a light color like silver.

Heibao SM1022

With the upgrade came a pickup truck! Price ranged from just 40.000 to 76.000 yuan. Lots of variants: the base version was called the SM1022, then came the SM1021E, then the SM1021ME, then the SM1021EA, and finally the SM1021EF. Size: 4940/1690/1670, 2850.

Design wise it stayed close to the Lucky Day, but the front bumper was rather different. It has very wild decals over the entire side of the vehicle. The car on the picture is the top-end EF. Note the cool ‘2200’ sticker at the far end, referring to the 2.2 liter Mitsubishi engine. Top speed with the 2.2 was 120 km/h.

The SM1022 base model had to do with a slightly less impressive engine: a 1.8 liter diesel with an output of just 50 hp and a top speed of only 90 km/h!

Heibao SM6471 ‘Honda CR-V’

The infamous Chinese Honda CR-V clone was actually made by at least a dozen different Chinese car makers, all using the same body and the same underpinnings. Heibao joined the club in 2005 with the SM6471.

It was not a bad looking car for a clone! The grille looked quite distinctive and the alloys are sporty. It was available with three different petrol engines: a 110 hp Shenyang-Mitsubishi 2.0 petrol, a 97 hp Harbin Dongan 1.5, and a 102 hp Mianyang Xinchen 2.2.

We have seen Harbin Dongnan before on this website but it is the first entry of Mianyang Xinchen. Welcome!

It was a large car for Heibao: 4900/1800/1775, 2850. These cars are always bigger than you expect because in your mind you compare it to a CR-V. It sure looks like a CR-V but the Honda is much smaller: 4600/1785/1750, 2620. I remember very well seeing one of these CR-V clones for the first time: it was truly gigantic.

Heibao Lucky Day upgrade 2

The Lucky Day received another upgrade in 2007, this time more extensive. It got a new grille, a new bonnet, new bumpers, new alloys, new wheel arch extensions, new side skirts, and a new roof rack. It still looks okay but it misses the purity of the original design. Engine remained the same.

Heibao SM1022 upgrade 1

The SM1022 got the same upgrade but it kept the old alloys. The horizontal bar in the grille is gray, whereas it is shiny with the Lucky Day. Sadly, it lost all the stickers.

An SM1022 on the road, with some damage on the right side of the front.

The interior of the same car. Note the enormous steering wheel. The faux wood was typical for Chinese cars of the time. Haibao really tried hard to make something special out of the design for the radio-CD player unit.

3M reflective tape is mandatory by law for every Chinese pickup truck.

Heibao SM6470

The next Heibao SM6470 was not an update of the Lucky Day but a new car. Again, it was a vehicle also produced by other manufacturers. Indeed, my previous article in this series was about Shuguang, which made exactly the same car. Here it is:

The Shuguang Challenger, designated DG6471. Note overall design, the bumper, grille, lights, wheel arch extenders, and everything else. The mirrors are different though!

Heibao SM1022

I am not sure what happened with the pickup truck. It is either the old one with a new front, in the same design style as the SUV, or a new car as well. Surely great to see the stickers came back!

A white-gray example with a new set of sporty five-twin spoke alloys.

Heibao SM6491 Yuandongli

Next, Heibao surprised with a much larger vehicle, the Yuandongli (原动力), best translated as ‘Driving Force’. Designation was SM6491. Engine was yet again the 2.2 liter Shenyang-Mitsubishi. The very early cars had a simple grill design and elegant alloys. That changed fast:

Now THAT is an aggressive grille. Knife-like structures between the grille and the lights, huge holes in the grille, a pointed bumper, and a huge Heibao badge. This car means business…

Rear light frame design was very creative. It has a ‘SUV 原动力’ script under the window. Below the license plate the full designation: SM6491-ME.

A nice gray-white example with gray-white decals on the sides.

In front of a new apartment building.

The AUX Cars

The AUX story is weird, but typical. In the early 2000’s China’s car market was booming and all sorts of companies wanted in, just like what is happening now with the EV-startup craze. The problem, then and now, was the mandated government license to manufacture cars. If the government didn’t grant you any, the only way into car making was buying an existing car maker.

In 2003 AUX entered the fray. AUX was a well-known electric appliance maker, most famous for their air conditioners. They too wanted to make cars but the government didn’t give car making permits to companies that made air conditioners. So AUX came to Heibao and they basically bought, via some misty constructions, the Shenyang-Heibao joint venture.

The quickly renamed it Shenyang AUX Automobile showed their first car, the…

… AUX Yuandongli (奥克斯 原动力). It was a Heibao Yuandongli with a redesigned front, a new logo, and a nice purple paint job. Strangely this car never happened. When the AUX Yuandongli really came to market it was just this:

It is a Heibao Yuandongli. With a Heibao badge. But on the license plate it says AUX Yuandongli. Messy messy. Engine remained the same, and so did the designation.

Aux did the usual marketing stunts. In one particularly interesting stunt in 2004 the recreated the Long March, China’s founding story, by driving a large convoy of cars to Yan’an in Shaanxi Province.

An AUX shop in 2004, with a nice red Yuandongli and another green one in the back. The red one has a bicycle rack on the roof. And it has the simple wheels again we saw at the very first Yuandongli-series!

A 2004 car. Sadly, trouble was brewing for AUX. Unknowing customers started suing the company after they found out their car was actually a rebadged Heibao. This of course can’t have been hard to figure out as there was a big Heibao badge on the grille. So these court cases are a bit odd.

Nevertheless, AUX decided to hide the Heibao connection a bit better and they changed the badge:

It was an oval badge with two vertical lines in the middle. There was no similarity to the AUX logo. There were new mirrors too, with integrated indicators. They also added, once again, a new set of flashy decals on the doors.

It was now 2005 and the car market took a pause. AUX got into financial trouble too, with shareholders accusing it of using money meant for investments in their core business for shoring up the car operation.

Pretty in dark blue!

As a result of all this trouble AUX ditched the entire car making business in 2005, just two years after they started. That was also the end of car making at Shenyang Heibao.

The Electric Cars

We are going back in time now to the very early 2000’s when Shandong Heibao developed a series of so called Low-speed electric vehicle (LSEV). Shandong Province has always been, and still is today, the main production base for LSEVs.

Heibao EV 2002

Their first car debuted in 2001 and was called the Heibao EV 2002. It was an odd-looking bubble car with a giant windshield and a truly impressive windshield wiper. It starts at the roof and reaches almost two-thirds of the windscreen.

Heibao claimed a range of 110 km and a top speed of 32 km/h. Power came from a set of 14 12V lead acid batteries. Weight was a hefty 1080 kg, but only 650 kg without the battery pack. Power is heavy… Power came from a 12kW AC asynchronous electric motor.

Heibao EV 2003

Their second car came in 2002, called the EV 2003. There is a system in that naming scheme… It was a cool two-door hatchback. Note the grille design, it is the same as on the first Lucky Day! Design was far more serious now. The EV 2002 looked like a normal car.

Heibao claimed a range of 80 kilometers, 30 less than with the EV 2002. That was because the EV 2003 was much bigger but it used the same battery pack. Top speed was claimed to be 40 km/h, which seems hardly believable, as it also used the same motor as the EV 2002. Tellingly, Heibao didn’t specify the weight of the 2002!

The gentlemen is the then-CEO of Shandong Heibao, showing is the EV 2003’s smart luggage space. There was space behind the seats and in a drawer in the bumper.

Export

The Heibao EV 2003 got interest from abroad. In 2003 a couple of cars were shipped to Toronto, Canada. They were imported by a Canadian company called Toronto Electric, which operated the EnviroMotive dealership in Toronto, which also sold EVs of other brands.

In the same year, one car was shipped to the United States for the 2003 Tour de Sol: The Great American Green Transportation Festival.  Canadian Monte Gisborne, boss of Toronto Electric, was interviewed there. He said:

“The price of the Heibao is $11,700 in Canada. That’s for a car with 4 speakers, AM/FM/Cassette stereo system, power windows, power door locks, 14 zero maintenance gelled electrolyte batteries, AC motor and controller and the fit and finish of a regular car.”

The innovative drawer, filled here with paper rolls. Note the sticker with a large red Heibao logo on it.

The controller and the cooling tower in the frunk, with a spare wheel. Sadly, the Heibao EV 2003 never made it to the United States and Environmotive, which is sill in business today, only sold a handful in Canada.

Victory!, the man gestures. And with that this story has to end. Heibao made so many cars it took me a while to write it all down. But I am already working on the next story in this series. See you soon!

Special thanks to Erik van Ingen Schenau for the street pics of the early Lucky Day.

Sources: 163, 163, ChinaCar, Baixing, Autohome, eNorth, Sohu, Sina, 360. EVCanada, EVCanada, EVCanada, 1688, AutoAuditorium.