Author: Erik Van Ingen Schenau

One of the intriguing mysteries of China’s car history is the missing CA70.

In the mid-1950s First Auto Works (FAW) started truck production and the development of a complete automobile production program. The first products were the CA10 truck, a CA30 cross-country truck, a CA40 dumper truck, a CA50 truck tractor, a CA80 agricultural truck.
And a CA71 car. The CA71 car is the Dongfeng which is beautifully described by my colleague Tycho in a recent article. Soon followed by the bigger Hongqi CA72.
That gives a mystery, as which car was the CA70?

Continue reading “The mystery of the missing CA70”

Car museums and veteran car exhibitions are getting more and more popular in China. These museums like to exhibit those cars which stood at the dawn of the Chinese automotive industry. And here they are confronted with a problem: due to intensive scrap regulations most of these cars have disappeared. China would not be China if there was a creative solution. The exhibitors simply make replicas of these cars. Now we meet two problems; one, the replicas are often crudely made, mostly due to ignorance; two, some museums don’t tell the visitor that he is looking at a replica. Here some examples.

Continue reading “Fake Veteran Cars in Chinese Car Museums”

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.

Continue reading “Questions, questions, questions.”

Officially the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 with the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. But in the last years before the end there was already a turnaround in car styling. Forgotten were the heavy ‘no-nonsense’ Cultural Revolution bodies. Suddenly there was a look direction east and the new designs were strongly influenced by the lighter Japanese car styling of that era.

Continue reading “Japanese car styling at the end of the Cultural Revolution.”

You would not expect this but the mass movement periods in China were very creative for the development of the car industry. I already described the birth of many protypes during the Great Leap Forward period 1958-1961. The styling in that period was much influenced by contemporary American styling.

Continue reading “The design of cars during the Cultural Revolution.”

Li Shufu’s first car was not a Daihatsu Charade copy but a Mercedes-Benz!
Read here how mr. Li started with taking photos of tourists with a Seagull camera to end up as the owner of five car manufacturers.

Continue reading “Li Shufu, mr. Geely, and the first car he made; a Mercedes Benz!”