CarBrandLogos archive · Hongqi · 1958

HongqiCA72

China's first home-built limousine, made for officials rather than customers.

Photo: JasonVogel · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Hongqi history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Hongqi CA72, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

1959 Hongqi CA72 05 -- Shanghai Automobile Museum

Origins

Hongqi means Red Flag, and the car was a political project before it was an industrial one. First Automobile Works in Changchun, which had been building Soviet-derived trucks, was directed to produce a domestic luxury car, and in 1958 it delivered the CA72. The engineering route was pragmatic: a Chrysler Imperial was dismantled and studied, and the resulting 5,655 cc V8 and automatic transmission owed a great deal to what was found inside it.

1959 Hongqi CA72 05 -- Shanghai Automobile Museum · Navigator84 · CC BY-SA 3.0

1959 Hongqi CA72 04 -- Shanghai Automobile Museum

Design and engineering

The styling was not copied. The grille was modelled on a traditional Chinese fan, the tail lamps on palace lanterns, and the detailing was deliberately national in a way the mechanical layout was not. Bodies were largely hand-formed, and output was tiny, measured in a few hundred cars across the whole run rather than thousands.

1959 Hongqi CA72 04 -- Shanghai Automobile Museum · Navigator84 · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

Nobody could buy one. Cars went to senior party officials and to state protocol duties, including open parade versions. Production ran to the mid-1960s before the larger CA770 replaced it, and surviving examples now sit in Chinese museums as the physical evidence that the country could build a complete car of its own.

Hongqi Convertible · ChengH · CC BY-SA 4.0

At a glance