North Korea is still surrounded by mysteries to this day. The inhabitants themselves hardly know what exactly lives and happens within the hermetically sealed borders. Yet the poverty-stricken country does have car factories. And there are even North Koreans who buy cars.
The more experienced reader will remember the time of the Cold War, a period when part of the world was hidden behind a hermetically sealed border. What transpired beyond that was shrouded in mystery. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent globalization through greater prosperity, cheaper travel and, of course, the Internet, have left few enigmatic countries. North Korea is an exception. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the communist country has been strictly separated from the outside world and, after a period of reasonable prosperity, has for decades been plunged into abject poverty caused by political mismanagement and boycotts by Western countries. Owning a car is not an option for the majority of the usually poverty-stricken population, but despite this North Korea does have a car industry. That is the least known corner of the industry as we know it and therefore all the more interesting to dive into.
First and foremost: it is precisely because of this isolation that little or no hard figures and facts are known. The Korean industry is not affiliated with international organizations such as the IOCA, which therefore does not keep statistics on North Korea. What we know is based on estimates and on sightings of the lucky few who were ever allowed to tour the country.
Soviet aid
As in many other less developed countries, the automotive industry in North Korea began with licensed productions. It was the Soviets who helped their new ideology partners along by supporting them in building factories. The Soviet Union granted the Koreans licenses to build GAZ light commercial vehicles and a four-door passenger car of the same brand, the M20 Pobeda. This was called Kaengsaeng Achimkoy in North Korea and in silhouette most resembled a Volvo PV444 (Cat Back). This was the first North Korean passenger car and perhaps that explains the name, which means morning flower. However, it did not budge, because more than a handful of copies have never been produced by the factory in Tokchon, about 100 km northeast of the capital Pyongyang. Later passenger cars were more successful, including the Jaju (a copy of the Volkswagen Passat) and the Paektusan, which we would mistake on the street for a (well-run) Mercedes-Benz 190. The Tokchon Motor Plant opened in 1950 and has an annual production of 20,000 units. At least, that’s the government’s official statement. Experts think that those numbers are exaggerated by a factor of three. Today the factory is called Sungri (Victory) Motor Plant.
A filled parking lot is a sight.
religious leader
During the entire second half of the twentieth century, Sungri was about the only and in any case the largest car factory in North Korea, but that status has now been lost to Pyeongwha Motors, a company with a very special history. Sun Myung Moon, a well-known religious leader in South Korea, but also a businessman, was born in North Korea and partly because of this, the reunification of both countries was one of his big dreams. This endeavor earned him much acclaim on both sides of the border and so it was possible that, despite his fiercely anti-Communist ideas (and his religious background), he was nevertheless welcome by the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, grandfather and ancestor. predecessor of current party leader Kim Jong-un. Sun Myung Moon proposed a joint venture between north and south to build cars together and thus come closer together. South Korea provided know-how and capital, North Korea a factory and personnel. Kim Il-sung was interested in this and that is how Pyeongwha Motors was born, as a kind of love baby of two arch-rivals. That also explains the name, because Pyeongwha means peace and the logo consists of two peace doves on the point of a close embrace.
The joint venture did not last long, but Pyeongwha Motors remained. It builds cars under different brand names for different market segments. Hwiparam, Bbeokgugi, Junma and Samcheonri. As with Sungri, the similarities with foreign models are striking. The Fiat Siena and Doblò, various Volkswagens, Chinese SUVs and even the South Korean executive car SsangYong Chairman have a North Korean lookalike.
Pyeonghwa Motors is the only one allowed to advertise with cars that hardly anyone can afford.
Helicopter in the garden
The total North Korean auto industry is believed to have a production capacity of between 40,000 and 50,000 units per year. That may be a fraction of what a modern Western car factory leaves per year – and by far the largest part of that capacity goes to vehicles for the military and industry – but that is nevertheless extraordinarily generous for North Korea. Although the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) has just under 26 million inhabitants, for the vast majority of them a private car is just as accessible as for us, for example, a helicopter in the garden. Literally, because a Pyeongwha Bbeokgugi costs about 3.4 million Korean won in its own country. Bearing in mind that the average Korean earns 3,000 won a month, simple math shows that he would have to put aside every penny for 94 years to call such a beautiful Bbeokgugi his own.
Apart from that, until a few years ago it was forbidden for most private individuals to buy a car. That door has been ajar since 2017, because the government recognizes private car ownership as a partial solution for the rickety freight transport by rail in the country. North Koreans who want to use their own car for servi-cha (courier services) can get a waiver. That sounds easier than it is, by the way. Because of the prices, the buyers are usually people with family or other ties in neighboring China or South Korea, from whom they get or borrow the necessary money. For 100 won you should officially count around 1 dollar, but on the black market a dollar does about 8,000 won and with that price the price of a new car is close to what we are used to.
But even if you have the money together, putting a car in your own name is not possible. ‘Your’ car has to be registered in the name of a state-owned company and before that, you’re a whole host of officials and bureaucratic bodies. You always have to shove a well-filled envelope under the table, if only because all those civil servants are underpaid by the state. In total you have to factor in about 300,000 won in bribes. The state-owned company then asks for a one-off 150,000 won to have the car registered in its name and you will lose 50,000 won per month to the Ministry of Security for the license plate. Nevertheless, it is estimated that there are about 11 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in North Korea.
The Bbeokgugi costs 3.4 million won. Just as accessible as a helicopter in your garden.
Propaganda
All the more remarkable is that in North Korea, where advertising is banned, you do see giant billboards for cars. However, these are not really intended to entice passers-by to buy a car, but as propaganda to show what their own industry is capable of.
Whoever is eventually allowed to call himself the owner of a car, will have plenty of space for all that money. There are no official (or even unofficial) figures on traffic intensity in the country, but according to people who have seen the North Korean highways, they are virtually empty. If you zoom in on Google Earth, you will indeed see strips of empty and often crumbled concrete, which are most reminiscent of those old, overgrown circuits that have been forgotten here and there in European forests. In all, North Korea has eight highways, often with glorious names that are at odds with their dilapidated, desolate character. The highway from the capital Pyongyang to Kaesong 170 kilometers to the south is distressing. Signs now and then read the remaining distance to the South Korean capital Seoul, but that is a joke, because no motorist comes there. The Reunification Highway, how ironically, is sadly dead on the demilitarized zone that isolates both countries from each other.
Another beautiful piece of dream asphalt is the Youth Hero Motorway, which connects the fifty kilometers between the capital Pyongyang and the port city of Nampo (which is the home of Pyeongwha, rightfully the Detroit of North Korea). The name refers to the young people who completed this tough job in the last years of the last century. Here, too, the road surface does not so much wear out due to intensive traffic, but it is mainly erosion that bites things down with the ravages of time. This highway is therefore primarily intended to be able to quickly move troops and military equipment in the event of a threat of war. In total, North Korea has eight of these highways, all but two of which end (or start, depending on how you drive) in Pyongyang.
Pyeongwha may have been a well-intentioned attempt at reconciliation, but the glorious brand has not yet had much effect in that area. Whatever the political shifts in the coming years, it will still be some time after that for the North Korean automotive industry to undergo the evolution to which neighboring South Korea owes its current thriving automotive industry.
The great leader himself prefers to drive western.
Do as I say, don’t do as I do
As often happened in strict communist countries, the credo ‘do as I say, don’t do as I do’ also applies in North Korea. Like his father and predecessor Kim Jong-il, the current leader Kim Jong-un is also a big fan of Mercedes-Benz. When he appears in public, he lets himself be driven in S-classes and it will undoubtedly have everything to do with the rather ramshackle road network in his state (4x the Netherlands and only 26,000 km (1/6 of the Netherlands) of roads, of which less than a thousand tarmac) that outside Pyongyang he prefers to travel by G-class. Kim Jung-il also seems to have a predilection for Audi and is said to have a nice collection of exclusive western cars, including Lamborghinis, Range Rovers and an Audi R8. That is quite special, because an international boycott has banned the sale of luxury goods to the DPRK since 2006. Several years ago, journalists from the New York Times were able to reconstruct the long, complicated smuggling route that two Mercedes-Maybach S600 Guards traveled from the Sindelfingen factory to Kim Jung-un’s garage in Pyongyang. The fact that the great leader manages to get hold of these kinds of cars is not such a disaster in itself, but it does little good for confidence in the watertightness of the ban on nuclear goods and weapons.
Stolen thrives
Those who enjoy the rare privilege of taking a look around North Korea with their own eyes, may come across a dark green Volvo 144. It is left over from a batch of a thousand cars that the country bought from the Swedes in 1974. On account, and Volvo will have learned from that, because the bill was never paid and the debt has now risen to $ 330 million.
This article originally appeared in Techzle 22 of 2021.