A superbly beautiful Great Wall Safe SUV, seen in the great city of Jinan, capital of China’s Shandong Province, in 2017. The good Safe was in a totally perfect original shape inside and out. Such a pretty car, if Great Wall made it today, I bet it would still sell like hell. CC6460D was the official factory designation.
The Safe was Great Wall’s first mass market SUV. For the early history of Great Wall, please see this article by my good friend Erik. The Safe debuted in 2002 and was manufactured until 2009, with various updates in between. Looking at the lights, grille, and wheels, this appears to be a post 2006 model. It is truly rare to see a Great Wall of this age in such an incredible original shape. Many have aged for the worse or were modified too much. But not this one! I don’t think I was ever this happy seeing a Great Wall.
The decals on the doors and the Safe badge were factory standard. ‘RV’ stood for Recreational Vehicle.
My interior photographing skills weren’t that good that day, but at least we get a good look at the mirroring building. This was on a car market, and the downstairs area of the building was a parts market, with a cheap hotel on the other floors. There is an URL there too: www.jnesc.com, a second-hand car website. It still works!
Happily, I found a period factory picture of the interior (via). Fabric seats are perfectly old-school, loads of black plastics, and a surprisingly modern center stack and dashboard. Note the levers for the gearbox and for the 4WD system.
Much better pic! The owner covered the seats with seat covers. The seats themselves seem rather high up and tilted upwards.
Technically, the Great Wall Safe was largely based on the second generation Toyota 4Runner (N120). It is yet unclear how exactly Great Wall got the technology and the blueprints, but it was most likely a semi-official deal, because the engine was sourced from Toyota too; a locally-made Toyota 491QE motor, rated at 106 hp and 190 Nm. The motor was mated to a 5-speed manual gearbox, sending horses to all four wheels. Price, in 2006, started at 88.800 yuan, which was a very good deal for so much car!
In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s Toyota did a lot of this sort of deals in China, selling obsolete technology to various Chinese car makers. These days were rarely officially announced and likely served as a deliberately misty back-channel money maker for Toyota.
Characters: 赛佛, Saifu, or Safe.
The incredible art on the spare wheel cover, showing a skier in purple snow. This may seem a bit odd, but Great Wall wasn’t the only (via) Chinese car maker using skiing decals on their cars. As always with good old stuff; it is getting rare today, especially in such a shape as this one. May someone ship this classic Chinese SUV to a museum, where it really belongs.
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