My Beijing-Jeep Cherokee BJ7250 City Special

Here we have my very own Beijing-Jeep Cherokee BJ7250, photographed in Beijing on a cold and smoggy winter’s day.

It was 16-01-2013 and I took my Jeep to the Agricultural Exhibition Center in Beijing. Back in those days you could drive your car straight up the main hall when there wasn’t any exhibition. No way today! Anyway. I parked my Jeep bang in front of the main hall.

My Jeep was manufactured in 1998 by the Beijing-Jeep joint venture in Beijing. It is 2020 today and I have been without Jeep for 1.5 years. Me and my family moved back to Holland in late 2018 and Jeep didn’t join.

I lived in China from 2003 until 2018. I bought Jeep from a friend in 2004 and kept her until the very end. In late 2018, I donated my Jeep to the Beijing Classic Car Museum in Huairou District.

Happily, when I handed over Jeep to the museum we agreed that I can  take it back whenever I feel such need. Something easy to agree on for the museum, I guess, when you know your donor is going home. But when I ever return to Beijing I will come to get my car.

My Jeep is a Beijing-Jeep Cherokee BJ7250 City Special. BJ7250 referred to the engine, in this case the 2.5 liter four-cylinder petrol with 135 hp. Horses went to the rear wheels only via a five-speed manual gearbox.

I bought Jeep for 4700 Euro from a friend of mine in 2004. He was, like me, a Dutchman. He worked for Shell. When he arrived in China in 2002 he bought Jeep from yet another Dutchman working for Shell, who bought it new in 1999.  So this car was in Dutch hands from 1999 until I gave it to the museum in 2018.

The Cherokee badge on the front fender.

When I arrived in China in 2003 I had never owned a car before. My only real-world driving experience was kicking around my parent’s Saab 900 and Citroen 2CV. In my first year in China I looked mostly at cheap new cars, such as the  the Chang’an Suzuki Alto, the Changhe-Suzuki R+, the Zhongxing Admiral, and similar such others.

The City Special badge on the front doors.

But while cool, these cars were not really manly. I wanted something a tad more rough and able to go up mountain and over the Great Wall. So I started to focus on a Cherokee, which at the time was a very popular car in Beijing, among Chinese and laowai alike.

The second set of tires ever. The wheels are a bit rusty here. Later I had them cleaned up. I will share some pictures of the later years later.

The Beijing Jeep badge on the wheel. With 北京 in characters and Jeep in English, just like on the bonnet.

Note the Fly KLM sticker on the window. That’s a Dutch airline. French-Dutch now.

I went to lots of car markets in Beijing to look for a Beijing-Jeep. At the time, a totally new one costs around 14.000 euro, which was too much for me. But there were loads of good cars available second-hand.

The BJC badge. BJC stands for Beijing Jeep Corporation, the full name of the joint venture.

The NL country sticker, put on the car by the first owner. NL stands for Nederland, which translates to the Netherlands. BJ7250 badge sits low just above the bumper.

Black 京A license plates were issued to foreigners and foreign companies from the 1980’s until the mid 2000’s. They started with 京A·00001, so the lower the number the earlier the registration. My car was the 14277th black-plate car registered in Beijing.

The fact that it is a 京A·1 makes it license plate royalty! Until 2012 or so people would pay lots of money for these plates to slap ‘m on new cars. Later on that was not allowed anymore, when they changed the rules so license plate numbers stayed with a person and not with a car.

The license plate frames are after-market and ultra cool. I bought them in 2008. They have the word Cherokee and a BJC badge. Sadly these frames became illegal later on and I threw them away. Wish I hadn’t done that, but ship happens I guess.

It was around that time that I met Sjors at a reception at the Dutch embassy in Beijing. Sjors is the Sheel guy I would eventually buy the car from. We had a lot of beer and became good friends, chasing lots of girls, drinking even more beers. That was the great life in Beijing in 2004.

Shell then suddenly decided to send poor Sjors to Siberia in Russia. Not Siberia as in any far place but really to Siberia, where Shell had a major project at Sakhalin. Sjors knew I was looking for a Cherokee and he offered me his car. I knew he had one but I had never seen it. When I did, I rally liked the way the car looked but I hesitated because I really a 4-wheel drive.

But in the end I decided to go for it and after the paperwork was done I had my own Jeep! Much later, Sjors would come back to China to marry his Chinese sweetheart, whose family lived near Shenyang in the northeast. I was the witness at the marriage and naturally I drove there with Jeep, a full-day ride.

The original 1998 government registration stickers. I always kept them on!

The boards on the side are after-market. I bough them in 2005 or so. Beijing-Jeep also offered factory side bars but I wanted side boards. I also bought the bull-bar which was an actual factory extra.

It took me a while to sort the car out. Sjors had been a very busy man and didn’t use Jeep very much. So the steering wheel was off-center, the gearbox was hard work, and there were all sorts of weird noises. Happily, nothing was seriously wrong and after some repairs everything worked perfectly. When I bought it it had only 45.000 km on the clock. As new!

The fog lights were factory standard. Normally they sit on the bumper. When I bought the bull bar the company that installed it left the fog lights as they were, so they were half-hidden behind the bull bar! I kindly asked them to move them lights to the lower bar of the bull bar. They did.

Jeep would look like this until 2014 when I decided to take the bull bar and the side boards off, to bring Jeep back to its original looks. I will share some pictures in a later post.

The Beijing Jeep badge on the bonnet.

‘The engine’s power was 136 hp and 180 Nm. That may not sound as very much but the BJ7250 was not very heavy. Only rear-wheel drive and no luxuries inside. Curb weight was an amazing 1400 kilo. That made Jeep surprisingly fast.

Over the years I surprised many, many, newer cars at the traffic lights. And in the 100-140 km/h range is was almost unbeatable on the endless Chinese highways. Lots of pull in 4th gear! Top speed was 160 km/h on the meter, in perfect conditions. But at that speed the car was really shaky and noisy. So I rarely pushed it further than 140, and Jeep felt best at 120.

Time for the interior! When I bought Jeep from Sjors, it had the original gray cloth seats. But the quality of these cloth was poor and broken in many places. So initially I used red cloth seat covers to cover the original gray cloth. But those weren’t very good either. Then I decided to get real red leather seats. I thought that was really cool. I still think it is really cool.

I payed some 2400 yuan for the job, leather seats and and a leather rear bench. They also had the faux-leather. Much cheaper, but I hate the stuff, always makes ya’ sweat on long journeys. The steering wheel cover is after-market too. I really needed that. The original wheel has a very tin and slippery rim, very dangerous. The silver floor mats are faux-metal plastic to protect the gray cloth floor.

The Beijing Jeep badge on the horn.

The bench. The quality of the leather was very good. I cleaned it once a year with a leather-cleaner liquid and the very same leather is still in the car today. As is the steering wheel cover!

No luxuries. All windows open manually. No sun roof. No nothing really. But that is good. When it ain’t there it won’t break. Originally it was fitted with a Philips radio-cassette player, which was really cool, because Philips is a Dutch brand. The Philips radio-cassette player was a factory option. Standard it had a brand-less radio. When I just got the car the player still worked fine. Sjors had left me one cassette, Abba Greatest Hits. I still have it. I played it continually for a year.  Sadly it broke down and I replaced it with a fake-Sony CD player, which worked rather well and is still in the car today. Later on, when I brought the car back to original specification, I tried very hard to find an original Philips player again. I still had, have, the manual, so I know the exact type. I failed to find one.

The instrument panel is very basic. There is a meter for oil temp, one blank, one very large meter for fuel, one for speed with km/h and MPH, a water temp meter, and a battery-power meter. The blue round thingy on the left is a clock. I bought it for no particular reason.

Well, what more do you need? 73236.9 on the clock here.

The air con was very basic too but it worked well. Beijing has cold winters and hot summers, so you do need a proper air con.

The plastics are of acceptable quality. The phone-like thingy is a handy device allowing you to stream MP3 music from your phone by Bluetooth and FM. I never really got how it worked but it did. These devices were very popular at the time.

Jeep badge ingrained in the cover.

For bringing me luck. I bought the gun and the shells in Beidaihe, a seaside tourist town some 5 hours by car from Beijing.

The motor! Covered with thick layers of real Beijing dust. The motor’s simplicity made it brilliant for China, where every shop was basically able to repair it. And over the years I had to find repair shops in quite a few places, but that is perhaps something for another story. Yes, Jeep was a great car but not one without problems…

The hoses had a nasty habit of coming loose. After a while, I got quite handy at putting them back myself! Otherwise it was a fine motor. It didn’t make much noise and like I said before it had enough power for the car. I love the look of the engine bay, it looks mechanical, real, powerful.

I don’t mind engine covers in principle but the raw looks of this motor are just brilliant. In the early days of the Beijing-Jeep joint venture the engines were shipped in from America but later on they were produced locally, like mine. In China it got a new engine code: C498QA1.

We are coming near the end of this story. I will write many more on my Jeep. I have loads of photos of Jeep in different places. And I have even more photos of all sorts of odd details. And I will show you later on how Jeep looked later on. And I have pics of Jeep in the museum’s storage hall with dozens of other amazing cars around it. And finally I have all the paperwork going back to 1998. Everything. The original certificate of sale, brochures, you name it. One day I will scan the whole lot.

For now we say goodby to Jeep, but she will be back on these pages soon!