A SouEast Soveran Golden, seen on a car market in Beijing. The big MPV was in a fine shape, painted in black and gray and fitted with the original factory alloys. The SouEast Soveran is an interesting mix of brands and places.
SouEast logo and Soveran name.
SouEast is the brand name of South East (Fujian) Motor Corporation (SEM). This is a joint venture between China’s Fujian Motor Industry Group Corporation, Taiwan’s China Motor Corporation (CMC), and Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors. The joint venture was founded in 1995, building cars under the SouEast and Mitsubishi brands. For a short while, SouEast also made the Dodge Caravan in China, under a joint venture with Chrysler (I will share pictures of the SouEast Dodge Caravan in a later post).
The branding has always been a bit messy. In the early days, it was mostly SouEast. Then, it became a mix of SouEast and Mitsubishi, often with the very same cars being available under both brands. Today, there is a clear distinction: the SouEast brand sells cars of their own design based on Mitsubishi platforms, and the Mitsubishi brand sells various Mitsubishi cars.
The SouEast Soveran was based on the Taiwan-build Mitsubishi Savrin, which in turn was based on the third generation Mitsubishi Chariot Grandis. The Soveran was fully SouEast branded, there were no Mitsubishi badges on the car. It had the SouEast logo on the grille, and SouEast badges on the back. The Chinese name is 菱绅, Lingshen.
The Soveran was made only for a short time, from 2004 until 2006. In that year, the Soveran was facelifted and renamed to… the Mitsubishi New Space Wagon! This sort of fuzzy rebranding and rebadging happened a lot in the 2000’s in China.
The SouEast Soveran was very luxurious for an MPV of that period. It had leather seats, six of them, in a 2+2+2 setup.
The Soveran was equipped with a Panasonic radio-cassette-CD-MP4 music-video entertainment system, with screens on dash top and in the headrests for the second row. The screen on dash top doubled as a reverse-camera system, which was very rare in 2004.
Power came from a Mitsubishi ‘Sirius’ 2.4 liter four-cylinder petrol engine, good for 130 hp and 205 Nm. The motor was mated to a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic. The latter was way more popular, I don’t think I have ever seen one of these with the manual. Price in 2004 started at 169.800 yuan and ended at 227.800 yuan.
Sadly I was unable to take a photo of the fancy third row because it was, well, totally gone, and so was the third row.
The Soveran carries black 京A·25825 license plates. Black license plates were issued to foreign owned companies from the 1980’s to the mid 00’s. These companies could buy a car locally, or import one. There were no limits on the number of cars, or on price, or engine type. The numbering started at 京A·00001, and then up. So the lower the number the older the car.
Now for the Golden part of the name! It was a special edition having to do with sports. The sticker says 金牌MPV. 金牌 (Jinpai) means ‘Gold Medal’. The English text says ‘Soveran Golden’.
The sticker refers to a four-year endorsement deal between SouEast Auto and the Chinese women’s volleyball team, starting in December 2004. In the summer of 2004, the team had won gold on the 2004 Summer Olympics in Greece.
Under the deal, SouEast ‘supported’ the team to win gold again, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the team used Soveran MPV’s to get around in China. Sadly, the deal didn’t work out as well as parties hoped; the volley-balling ladies only took bronze in 2008.
SouEast always used a typical font with an open E.
DN6481H is the official government-mandated model designation. All SouEast cars had designations starting with DN, short for Dongnan (东南), and that is the Chinese name of SouEast. Fuzzily, Dongnan literally means East South. China does compass directions the other way around, so east-south is actually south-east, west-north is north-west, and so on. This can be rather confusing, but after a while you remember it.
A great MPV with many influences and brands! More on SouEast other cars soon.
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