Driving from Los Angeles to Pebble Beach for Car Week means that you adjust your car-spotting expectations significantly. You go into this knowing you’re going to be seeing some rare and remarkable cars, and you’ll just have to calibrate your brain’s Losing Your Shit sliders accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll just end up in a delirious coma of astoundednessitude, due to the constant flow of cars that would, under normal circumstances, have you talking about them all week. Even knowing this, I don’t think I was prepared to see one particular staggeringly rare car that looked a lot like a staggeringly normal car, and it all happened in, of all places, a Carl’s Jr parking lot.

The car started life as a Lincoln Town Car but is now a Hongqi Qijian (红旗 旗舰) CA 7460. I described what Hongqi cars were about for Jalopnik years ago, when a pair were brought to the Pebble Beach Concurs d’Elegance from the Sanhe Classic Car Museum in Chengdu:

Hong Qi means “red flag” in Chinese, and is the oldest passenger car maker in (well, post-1949) China, being founded in 1958. Hong Qi’s cars were, like Soviet ZIL limousines, not for regular people to drive, but were reserved for government officials, diplomats, dignitaries, and foreign heads of state. If you meet an elderly Chinese person with memories of riding in a Hong Qi, they’re probably a Big Deal.

Now even though I said this particular Hongqi started life as a Lincoln Town car, that doesn’t really make it any less of a Hongqi, because this is how all Hongqi Qijian CA 7460s started life, since Ford supplied nearly-complete Town Cars to the Hongqi factory from 1998 to 2005, where Hongqi changed all the badging, headlights, taillights, trunk lid, grille, added their trademark “red flag” hood ornament, and more.

That also happens to be exactly what Yang, a student at Art Center College of Design and a Hongqi intern, did to his car that we saw in that fateful Carl’s Jr parking lot. You can see the car and Yang and hear what he did here:

The resulting look definitely still feels like the Town Car, but all of the details are strange and different, from the unique Chinese fan-inspired grille to the slightly more curvaceous trunk lid, to the taillights with their amber indicators, to that wedge of glowing red plastic boldly mounted on the hood.

I think this is pretty incredible; the Hongqi CA 7460 is all but unknown in America, and is incredibly rare in China as well. Yang bought the Town Car in America, then in China managed to find a CA 7460, which he then stripped of its unique parts and took them to America with him, where they were used to transform the Lincoln into the Hongqi.

It’s sort of like how you may have fantasized about getting an old Chrysler 300 and then going to Europe and finding a Lancia Thema, then bringing home all the unique body parts to transform your 300 into a Thema. The only difference is that the Hongqi is much more rare and Yang actually did it.

The ratio of effort expended here to making something conventionally valuable or even recognizable to most people is, by most standards, not great. But to our standards, the only standards that matter right now, I think Yang has done something fantastic. He’s taken a pretty run-of-the-mill Town Car and made it into something baffling and unexpected.

A blip in the basic fabric of reality as we expect it, a peculiar ambassador from the other side of the world, both familiar and unfamiliar.

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