Sao Penza

Surveying the landscape of our roads, I’m as guilty as anyone of wishfully thinking the world would be better off driving cars five, ten, or even 25 years older than we have now.

Reality is, unless you’re cherry picking certain makes, models, years — and adorning the older car’s structure with enough plot armour to survive modern safety and emissions standards — plenty of people will simply see it as an old car at a new price.

Exhibit A: when more than a thousand 1989 Mazda 323 (BF) were built in South Africa by a totally real company called SAMCOR, sent to the UK as the 1991 Sao Penza, selling for £2,000 less than its rivals…it took just 20 months for the whole thing to go “ti’t’sup,” as local slang would dictate.

Because the UK is a notoriously brutal landing point for all sorts of vehicles, the numbers of surviving Sao Penza are at best one, and perhaps miraculously…two cars. 

For the curious, ‘Sao’ either meant nothing, or it stood for “South African Origin”. Penza is a city in Russia. Cool, frigid even.

Here, I stand on the shoulders of giants at Petrol Blog (2025, 2011) and Autoshite (2019) for this information, and leave this page as a marker — a gathering place, really — for those of us who have ‘Sao Penza’ in our search histories to share any and all updates on this completely boring-yet-fascinating footnote’s footnote of Mazda lore.

If you’re a digital artist, where’s our Sao Penza GTR, made from the parts off of a rally-bred, North American-spec Mazda 323 GTX Turbo?

Back to the ‘SAMCOR’ of it all. This wasn’t a fly-by-night operation, it was a merged entity, formed from bits of Ford Motor Company of Canada’s South African subsidiary and a car engineering and assembly company called Sigma Motor Corporation (Wikipedia).

SAMCOR (Wikipedia)…love that easy, breezy ALLCAPS vibe…

A quick glance through the back catalogue of models produced or imported by those two companies includes Mitsubishi-engined Mazda 323s, the Ford ‘Husky’ (a rebadged Mitsubishi minibus), Peugeot 504 ‘Super 7’s, Citroën CXs, and Chrysler SE, a Chrysler Valiant but possibly somehow even worse.

Why the UK was chosen as the entry point for a few shipments of Sao Penzas, we’ll never know, just as we’ll never know how spectacularly this story could have unfolded had customers taken to the Penza and the South African automaker was overrun with orders.

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