Last month I posted a post on the cars of Hangtian Auto. Like many of automakers at the time, the company was also involved in the misty business of the Crazy Car Production Days of Guangdong (CCPDoG™).
This was basically a ‘creative’ way to get around China’s extremely high import tariffs for foreign-made cars in the late 1990’s. Several companies would team together to ‘produce’ cars in China, piggy-backing on an existing Chinese car maker with a valid car making license. They would ship near-finished cars from abroad to China and assemble them there. This assembly wasn’t much more than attaching the wheels and such like. Under the rules then valid in Guangdong Province, this counted as ‘local production’, so there were no import tariffs. A foreign-made car had magically become a China-made car. Read all the details about it here.
Hangtian Auto produced two cars under the Crazy Car Production Days of Guangdong:
- Honda Odyssey (first generation, RA1).
- Mitsubishi Pajero (second generation, V20).
The first generation Honda Odyssey (North America) was made from 1995 until 1999. Power came from a 2.2 liter four-cylinder petrol engine. The Hangtian Odyssey was designated GHT6470. It has Hangtian badges instead of Honda badges.
This beautiful gray example was seen by Erik in period (!). It looks brand new and it has the designation badge on the rear, on the right side of the license plate:
The second generation Mitsubishi Pajero has a crazy history in China. It was produced fully legally in a joint venture, it was legally and semi-legally sub-licensed to other car makers, it was copied, and many were ‘produced’ by different companies under CCPDoG, including by Hangtian. I only found one image of the Hangtian Pajero. You can just see the Hangtian badge on the grille. There is a designation badge on the front fender but it is sadly unreadable. The car on the photo seems a top-spec example with a bull bar, side bars, and chromed mirror housings.
And these were the known Crazy Car Production Days of Guangdong cars of Hangtian Auto. If we find more I will add them to this post.
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