This little pretty brown car is a real Jonway UFO, seen in Beijing in 2017. And that was very special. These never sold in big numbers in the Chinese capital, and lots of them have since been scrapped. Happily, this example was in a very fine shape, albeit covered with dust and some dirt.
The Jonway UFO, also known as the Jonway A380, debuted in China in 2005. It received a large dose of criticism for looking far too much like a second generation Toyota RAV4 (XA20).
The Jonway UFO was made by a company called Jonway Automobile, based in Taizhou city, Zhejiang Province. Production ended in 2016 after two facelifts. Our brown UFO is an original pre-facelifts example. Fuzzily, Jonway’s site is still online, with news dating until 2016. You can still see and read all bout the UFO and its variants.
The original UFO came in 3 and 5-door form. The 3-door variant is the coolest, fitted with a factory-standard roof rack, sporty wheels, and a spare wheel cover. Note the many shared-bicycles in the background. This was an area where broken shared bikes were dumped, as replacing them was cheaper than repairing. More pics of these bike-dump place in a later article.
The interior was nice with a infotainment screen in the middle with aircon controls below. The owner added warm seat covers and a dash cam.
The 3-door UFO’s official designation was FD6392C, and at the time the UFO was born, designations were still printed in full on the car. Today, that is only so with commercial vehicles and buses, but no more with passenger cars.
Power came from a 1.6 liter four-cylinder petrol engine, good for 100 hp and a top speed of 155 km/h. The UFO was also available with larger 2.0 and 2.4 petrol engines. All were sourced from Shenyang-Mitsubishi, the famous engine-making joint venture that powered, and still powers, the cars of literally dozens of Chinese car makers. Without Shenyang-Mitsubishi, we wouldn’t have so many different car brands in China. Price for the 1.6 powered UFO started at 76.800 yuan in 2008.
The characters write 永源飞碟 , Yongyuan Feidie, or Jonway UFO. I have always liked the UFO logo, shaped like an UFO with the ‘O’ looking like a little extraterrestrial fellow. In the end and over the years, Jonway sold quite a lot of UFO’s. They were exported as well, to at least ten countries around the world. So it was a success, although tainted by the copy-cat design.
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