Is the Israeli attack on Iran the first on a country that manufactures electric cars by one that doesn’t?
I met this gorgeous car and its proud owner in Hendon the other day. He’d first met the Hillman Hunter in Iran when he was a kid. Not this one – it would have had a Paykan badge on it. That was the brand used by an Iranian firm called Iran Khodro that licenced the design from British manufacturer Rootes Group. He’s just restored this one, in its original, gorgeous, deep orange colour (he’s about to start on the engine).
When we met, next to the car, parked up on the wide pavement in West Hendon, North London, we bonded because our families had both owned a car like this when we were kids (I’ll be honest, ours was the downmarket Avenger, although also the estate model). The Paykan version, cut off from its British roots, survived the Islamic revolution and was manufactured 100% natively for almost fifty years, hanging on long beyond its design life because war and sanctions prevented it from being replaced.
The footage we’re seeing from the attacks on Tehran shows the expected mix of European and Asian cars in the rubble and in the lines of cars leaving the city. Iran’s 1970s ambitions for import replacement-led growth fell apart when the Islamic Republic was definitively kicked out of the family of nations after the revolution but Iran did not stop making cars and Iranians did not stop loving them.
Oportunities for the country to restart its integration with the world economy have come and gone – cars licenced from Renault, Citröen and Kia were manufactured there until sanctions were tightened in the 2010s. The latest set-back looks as close to final as any we’ve seen so far, of course. If President Trump sends American forces to assist it’ll probably be decades before another car is manufactured in Iran, under licence or otherwise (pretty sure he’d be furious if he found out they used to build Cadillacs there).
Iranian car culture looks fascinating and distinctive – when you’re shut out of a globalised passion like cars and car modification you’ll pretty soon develop a kind of mutant culture that celebrates different values. For instance, in Iran the unglamorous Peugeot 405 (another one of those cars built under licence – you’ve definitely ridden in one if you’ve ever hailed a cab in half of Europe) is a focus for Iranian hotrodders but they don’t drop their 405s to make them look cool like an American or a Brit would, they jack them up – and this, I read, is a complicated cultural reference that has its origin in the fact that the car was tough enough to be used in smuggling operations, in trackless border areas where you’d need a bit of extra ground clearance. Locally manufactured mash-ups – a Mazda chassis with what looks like a Renault body, for instance – are a solution to the embargo on parts and machinery. The Paykan itself has had a long afterlife too and modified versions are cult vehicles with younger drivers who’ve developed a freaky design culture of their own (and of course they show up in videogames).
Foreign car brands are still built in Iran but they’re not European in origin any more, they’re Chinese. Some are built under licence by Iran Khodro, the people who built the Paykan, including this EV, which looks pretty cool and is licenced from a Chinese firm called Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co, which just happens to be a subsidiary of global car giant Stellantis, parent company of all-American brands Jeep and Chrysler and RAM trucks. Oops (and it’s not the only Iranian-built EV). Some of these cars are manufactured directly by Chinese or joint-venture companies, firms that evidently have little fear of sanctions (the Tehran Auto Show, in January of this year, looks like it was pretty busy – over thirty Chinese brands were present).
Iran has a fast-growing population of 90 Million, huge reserves of oil, 16% of the world’s gas reserves and a hunger to participate in the world economy. The bleak and brutal regime of the mullahs has evidently not even slightly repressed the desire of Iranians to enjoy sophisticated consumer goods and modern lifestyles. Historians should note that the current attacks by Israel might well be the first by a country that does not manufacture electric cars on one that does.
I couldn’t finish without endorsing the movies of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami here. The man was evidently a car nut. In his beautiful Taste of Cherry, a man drives around Tehran in a classic Range Rover (which looks old enough to have preceded the revolution) looking for someone who will bury him when he kills himself, which he has impassively resolved to do.
In Ten, the action is confined to the front seats of a Tehran taxi, driven by a young woman whose conversations with ten different passengers add up to a beautiful, humane film.
- It turns out that the car is a battleground in Iran’s permament dialogue between Islamic doctrine and civil society. Specifically whether a car can be regarded as a private place where a woman might not be obliged to wear her headscarf, for instance (looks like that’s a ‘no’).
- Fascinated also to learn that the Iranian car industry (which is the biggest in the region by a long way) has an export element and that there’s a plan to export cars built by a joint venture in Azerbaijan to Russia, where the ambition is to ‘soak up the bottom end’ of the market’. Sanctioned states got to stick together.