Despite the country’s legitimate automotive industry, Chinese copycat cars are still very much a thing. The latest clone out of the growing nation is a Toyota Land Cruiser LC300 that seems to have been left in the dryer for too long. The tiny vehicle, possibly nothing more than a low-speed quadricycle, was posted to the Chinese social media site Weibo. It’s simultaneously very amusing and an enigma.
The post on Weibo offers few details about the little truck, and digging by Carscoops, who was the first to discover the car, only offered a little more context. It appears to be manufactured by a company called “Kuluze.” A little searching on AliExpress, a shopping website with mostly Chinese vendors, shows that Kuluze is the manufacturer of automotive lighting equipment and other related accessories. It’s plausible this is something like an automotive supplier deciding to go all-in on its own vehicle like if Webasto, which makes the hard top roof for the Ford Bronco, decided to make the rest of the car as well.
If this seems like a tall order for an automotive supplier, well, that’s probably why it’s styled like an existing Japanese truck as opposed to something homegrown and why it likely features a lot of off-the-shelf parts. The wheels, for instance, are a relatively generic alloy wheel style. The rear axle likewise appears to be a relatively crude unit that can be purchased on sites like eBay or AliExpress. You can see the aluminum casing on the motor in a transverse configuration behind the pumpkin of the differential. This truck is likely rear-wheel-drive only and probably has no more than 10 horsepower—if that.
I think we really just have to enjoy this for what it is, though: Effectively a golf kart dressed up to look like a Land Cruiser. The side of the thing says “COME ON,” which is probably meant to be encouraging but sort of seems desperate in the context. Likewise, the actual “Kuluze” logo seems photoshopped in place.
Is this a copy? Yes. A serious one? No.
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