About the History of Cars in China
In 2005 China’s Nanjing Automobile bought the right to the MG brands, and various assets of the MG Rover Group.
But things were pretty messy in England and the Chinese were somewhat inexperienced. This lead to lots of confusion over what Nanjing Automobile had purchased exactly, and what not. Further complicating matters was Honda, which owned the most of the rights to the design of the Rover 45.
Continue reading “The Original Chinese MG3 & MG5 That Almost Made It To The Market”
In 2002 China Brilliance and MG Rover started talks about a joint venture to make the Rover 75 in China.
During the negotiations MG Rover shipped two dozen 75’s with Brilliance badges to China, with the aim of showing the Chinese side how a ‘Brilliance-Rover 75’ would look like. All these cars were powered by the 2.5 liter V6.
What MG Rover probably didn’t expect was that some of these cars were actually sold and ended up on Chinese roads with valid license plates. Most, but not all, of these cars were labelled as Zhonghua B8.
This magnificent machine is an MG 7L. For those of you who don’t know, when MG Rover went bust Nanjing Auto and SAIC were in a heated battle to get the brands. Nanjing ended up getting the most and made cars based on the 75/ZT badged as MG’s and SAIC obtained enough from the sale to make Rover Roewe badged cars based on the same platform. So yes, at one point there were two different companies making essentially the same car just 300km apart. Eventually someone realized this was a bit silly and SAIC ended up buying Nanjing Auto in 2007.
Continue reading “The MG 7L, a Chinese take on a British classic”