A pink Land Rover Defender 3-door, seen in Beijing in 2015. The beautiful British barge is painted in Pink, no wrapping here, and further sexed up with a snorkel, headlight protectors, a skid pad, chrome bars under the doors, and sporty five-spoke alloys.
I found this Land Rover in the parking lot of Crab Island In Beijing. Crab Island was a large playground / amusement park / entertainment area in the northeast of Beijing. At the time, there was a huge and very famous car shop there, called FB Auto. They had a lot of great shows, and it was during one of these shows that I saw this Defender. It wasn’t part of the show, as the lot was otherwise empty, but it sure should have been.
Pink does the old Defender a lot of good, much better than that always green or brown. Steering wheel with a red cover a slight disappointment, as it should have been Pink too.
Taillight protectors don’t look too effective. Exhaust pipe peeping out from behind the left mudflap.
At the time, the Land Rover was a popular car among the wealthy in China. It was officially imported but demand was much higher than supply, so most cars arrived via the gray dealer-to-dealer parallel market. The only officially available Defender was the five-door version with the 2.4 liter 122hp diesel under the bonnet, in 2015 priced at 748.000 yuan or $ 121.000.
The diesel engine made it a very hard sell in China. Passenger cars with diesel engines were, and still are, not allowed in most big cities. One of the tricks to get around this rule was registering the car in another city where the rules were less strict, like this Pinky here, which has Tianjin license plates. That meant someone could at least own a diesel, but it didn’t mean they could actually enter a city center. In Beijing, for example, diesel-powered cars were only allowed outside the 5th Ring Road at the time, and not inside. Crab Island was just outside the 5th.
Five spoke alloy wheels with wide semi-off-road tires look great under the Land Rover.
More on the brilliant FB Shows in later posts, I’ve been to many over the years and got over a trillion photos. But there was just one pink Defender, and it looked brilliant.
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