A beautiful black Geely Meirenbao sports car, seen in Beijing in 2011. The great Meirenbao was in a great shape, looking almost as new, painted in black with the original alloy wheels. The car was fitted with a racy after-market body kit and a fake air intake on the bonnet.
The Meirenbao was China’s very first self developed sports car. Geely translated the name as Beauty Leopard, but it actually means Beautiful Leopard. The first generation Geely Meirenbao was made from 2003 until 2006. Early cars had a Geely logo on the bonnet but later ones got this MyBo leopard badge:
The name ‘MyBo’, which was an English transliteration & abbreviation of Meirenbao: ‘Mei (My) renbao (Bao)’. The gold badge showed a leopard’s head with a crown on top and the name Mybo below the beast’s neck. The surrounding shield was silver and with five stars in the lower part.
In 2006, the Meiranbao received a facelift and in 2010 it was succeeded by the Geely China Dragon.
The rear wing was standard and thus not a part of the after-market body kit. The exhaust pipe is original Geely too, and so are the somewhat wild quad-light units. The Meirenbao was a daring project for Geely, a company that at the time was still very young and only made a bunch of Xiali-based small cars.
The Geely Meirenbao-Mybo was available with two engines: a 1.3 with 86 hp and 110 Nm and a 1.5 with 94 hp and 128 Nm. Both engines were mated to a 5-speed manual gearbox, sending horses to the front. Top speed was 170 and 175 respectively, 0-100 12.6 and 12. So for speed the kind of engine didn’t really matter. For price it did. Base price of the 1.3 in 2005 was 99.900 yuan, whereas the 1.5 started at 118.800 yuan.
I once drove a Meirenbao at a wedding near Shenyang and I was pretty impressed. It was much sportier than I had expected, with a quick throttle response and reasonable sharp steering. Build quality was so so, but that didn’t really matter to me, as I was driving China’s first real sports car (: