Proton GEN2 badged as Europestar in China

A recent lucrative export deal to China involving the Proton GEN2 has been cited as one of the ways to spearhead Proton’s recovery, as most of you would know by now. Proton was to export 30,000 completely built up Proton GEN2 cars to China for Jinhua Youngman to rebadge under the Europestar brand, with a further possible 80,000 units to be assembled in China.
Thanks to spyshots by Chinese automotive industry website Cheshi, we now find out that the “localisation” of the Proton GEN2 by Jinhua was not just limited to a left hand drive conversion and swapping badges with the Europestar badge. The Europestar GEN2 gets a completely new front fascia that looks like the poor car has jaundice, and the rear crop circle lamps get a similiar treatment.
UPDATE: Some of you may remember the spyshots of the facelifted Proton GEN2 due to be launched very soon. It too had a larger grille, although not as over the top as the Europestar version.
More images including rear light treatment are after the jump.




Proton has secured a deal to supply fully built-up (CBU) Proton GEN2 cars to Youngman Automobile Group Ltd Co. to be sold in China. The agreement was signed between Proton Managing Director Dato’ Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir and Youngman through its Chairman, Pang Qingnian.
The deal involves a minimum of 30,000 Proton GEN2 CBU cars that wil be rebadged in China under the brand EUROPESTAR and eventually Youngman and Proton (through Lotus Engineering) will be developing a new range of EUROPESTAR cars together. This supply contract is for a period of 20 months from the date of the first delivery of vehicles.
I think it’s best that the underlying components of these new EUROPESTAR cars use component sharing with Proton cars, that way the economies of scale for both Youngman’s EUROPESTAR and Proton can improve together. From what I understand, the deal involves technical licensing of the GEN2 platform as well as the CamPro engine for future EUROPESTAR cars.
Proton MD Syed Zainal says these are landmark win-win agreements as it would enable Proton to sell its products and commercialise its technologies in China through Youngman for their brand of passenger cars in a huge market with promise of exponential growth. Imagine, the Chinese auto market is already huge as it is, yet in reality Chinese car ownership is only at 1% of it’s population and is set to grow by 20 to 30% annually.
“We are therefore positive with the prospects and export optimisation that will result in production volume increase at the Tanjung Malim plant. We are equally optimistic of the opportunities in commercialisation of PROTONs technologies and intellectual property rights,” added Syed Zainal.
However, in Proton’s announcement in Bursa Malaysia, it stated that the relationship of Proton and Youngman is one of independant contracting parties and shall not be construed as creating an agency or partnership between the parties.