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.
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Chinese Car Brands that Time Forgot – Zhenjiang Auto Works
Today in Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot (CCBTTF™): Zhenjiang Automobile Works.
Zhenjiang Automobile Works (ZAW), based northwest of Nanjing in Zhenjiang city, potentially has a rather long history that dates back to as early as 1958 according to this Zhenjiang History website. However, we will have to fastforward to 1973 because we simply have no information on the company before this time.
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Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot: Hainan Automobile Works and Hainan Mazda
Today in Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot (CCBTTF™): Hainan Automobile Works.
Hainan Automobile Works (henceforth referred to as HAW) was founded in 1989 as a result of cooperation between the Hainan government and already established Hainan Auto Stamping Factory (henceforth referred to as HASF). HASF had experience with producing automobile components but the new company (HAW) would need a full assembly line on which to produce vehicles. Help came from an unlikely source – former President of The Philippines Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos sold HASF a factory that was once operated by Ford between 1968 and 1984. It was in 1988, 4 years after Ford ceased manufacturing operations in The Philippines that Marcos sold HASF the factory, allowing them to obtain a production line for their own future vehicle manufacturing. In 1989, Hainan Auto Stamping Factory was renamed Hainan Automobile Works.
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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.
The Hongqis abroad.
The list of exported Hongqis is growing. Today I counted 16 cars. Five of them in the USA, two in Japan. The other countries with each one are: France, Germany, Switzerland, San Marino, Rumania, Hong Kong and South Korea. There is (maybe) an unknown number in North Korea, but that is not confirmed.
I will show them to you, each with some words from their own story, in the order of their age.
Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot: Guangzhou Yunbao
Today in Chinese Car Brands That Time Forgot (CCBTTF™):Guangzhou Yunbao. Guangzhou Yunbao was a car manufacturer based in then Huadu city, now a part of Guangzhou, lying in the northern part of the city., Guangdong Province. They made several cars, all of them connected to Nissan in some way, for most of the 1990’s.
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Japanese car styling at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
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.
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The design of cars during 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.
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Development of cars during the Great Leap Forward.
This article gives an overview of the more unknown products developed in the period 1958-1961. Styling was strongly influenced by contemporary American styling. Continue reading “Development of cars during the Great Leap Forward.”
Li Shufu, mr. Geely, and the first car he made; a Mercedes Benz!
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.
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