Spotted: a Brilliance BS4

The spotted specimen

Sometimes you don’t have to travel far at all to come across something special. In our editorial parking lot, this Brilliance BS4 suddenly appeared. With Polish license plates, from the Szczytno region. A few days later he was there again, allowing a good photo of the front as well. What is the Brilliance BS4 a car again?

The Brilliance BS4

The Brilliance BS4 is a four-door sedan introduced to the Chinese market in 2006. For the development, Brilliance collaborated with renowned European brands such as BMW and Porsche, although we have not been able to find out their exact contribution. It is hard to believe, but the design of the car came from the famous Pininfarina… In 2008, an estate car was added to the range, but it was reserved for the Chinese market.

For completeness, in the home market, the model has also been sold under the brand and type names Brilliance M2, Brilliance Splendor, Huachen Junjie and Zhonghua Junjie. In North Korea, the car was produced under license and sold as Pyeonghwa Hwiparam II.

Engines from Mitsubishi

Propulsion provided 1.6-, 1.8- and 2.0-liter four-cylinder gasoline engines. Basically, these engines came from Mitsubishi, although Brilliance made some modifications of its own to some of them. There were plans to add a diesel to the offering especially for Europe, but it never came to that. More on that in the next paragraph. For the transmission, depending on the engine variant, there was a choice of a five- or six-speed manual transmission, or a four- or five-speed automatic. The drive always went to the front wheels.

The Brilliance BS4 in Europe

Brilliance was ambitious and wanted to introduce the BS4 to the German market as early as 2007, hoping to expand to other European countries from there. The Brilliance BS4 was supposed to offer a lot for little, just as Korean brands once made it big. Eventually the European introduction was delayed until 2008, as Brilliance made some more improvements to the car, especially in the area of safety structure.

However, the European career was short-lived. The Euro NCAP had not tested the Brilliance, but the German ADAC was curious about the car’s safety. In house, they organized their own “Euro NCAP test. Despite the modifications, the crash test result was not the best: three stars. In fact, according to the tightened Euro NCAP criteria introduced in 2009, the car would have received zero stars. According to the ADAC, the Brilliance BS4 therefore had “a 1997 safety level.” The subsequent negative publicity led to the BS4 soon disappearing from the European market again. Moreover, that low price was not so bad in the end (you could buy a Volkswagen Golf for barely more), so even before the crash test and associated publicity, few were sold.

No successor to the Brilliance BS4

In China itself, the car initially sold reasonably well, with 30,000 units sold in its introduction year. With that, he accounted for as much as 80% of the brand’s sales. The numbers did decline each year thereafter, to only about 2,400 units in 2013. Consequently, production ceased in 2014 and a direct successor was not forthcoming.