Would You Buy a Chinese Car from This Man?

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Bricklin's latest vision is far and away his most convincing yet. There's little disputing that China, already producing many high-quality high-technology products for a fraction of the price that they can be made in most other places, will become a force in the U.S. car market. Of the many automakers in China, Chery has one of the most modern manufacturing facilities going -- a state-of-the-art factory in Wuhu, a city of one million. Chery also has substantial support from the local and central government in China.

Bricklin is getting his seed money from Per Arneberg, a shipping mogul who has invested with him in the past. Allen & Co., the prominent investment banking firm, has signed on to help structure the financing for his dealership network. William J. vanden Heuvel, a permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations, and Maurice Strong, the U.N.'s undersecretary-general and director of the World Economic Forum Foundation, have joined the board of Visionary Vehicles.

"Who wouldn't want to be part of this?" Bricklin asks, adding that the Chery deal is the one he has been searching for his whole life -- his best opportunity to cause a sea change in the kinds of cars people buy and the way they go about buying them. "This is an industry in flux," he says. "Can you believe that General Motors would be rated the same as junk bonds? I'm only trying to take a bite out of a pie. This is easy for me, this is what I do."

That may very well be true. But while Bricklin now has a wealth of experience to draw from, he also has an enormous obstacle to overcome: the track record that comes with all that experience.

Malcolm Bricklin grew up among Philadelphia's row houses. He says one standout memory of his childhood is that he never liked to eat: "Stopping to eat meant I had to stop playing." He was also a budding go-getter who used to work in his family's furrier shop and stretch animal hides for 25 cents each. He later dropped out of the University of Florida at the age of 19 after his father folded a hardware supply business in Orlando. Stepping in where his dad had failed, Bricklin hired his father's best salesman and started selling hardware store franchises called Handyman in 1958. The chain grew to 149 stores, but eventually collapsed in a morass of disputes.

Seven years later, after abandoning an effort to sell an early version of a video jukebox (being ahead of his time is a repeated theme in the Bricklin chronology), he found himself in New York brokering a deal that netted the city's police force 25,000 Lambretta motor scooters from an Italian distributor desperate to unload them. Thinking he might be onto a trend, Bricklin started negotiating with a Japanese manufacturer, Fuji Heavy Industries, to import a different breed of scooters called Rabbits. (Volkswagen later paid Bricklin a modest sum for clear U.S. rights to the name.) Fuji crossed him up by deciding to cancel production of the Rabbit, but Bricklin learned that Fuji also owned a line of cars it called Subaru. He hurried off to Japan with his golfing buddy and partner Harvey Lamm and negotiated exclusive North American distribution rights for the Subaru model 360. Bricklin and Lamm together invested $75,000.

Because the tiny 360 weighed less than 1,000 pounds, U.S. Customs considered it a "covered motorcycle," which meant it was not subject to the usual safety standards of automobiles. Shares of the newly incorporated Subaru of America started trading on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1968, and the company began taking delivery of thousands of the 965-pound steel boxes. Selling for $1,300, the Subaru 360 paved the way for the Japanese invasion of American highways.

Subaru also helped catapult Bricklin into the limelight and into a $150 million payday when he sold his shares and handed the reins over to Lamm. There were reports at the time of investor unhappiness with Bricklin's freewheeling spending style. One example: his office at New Jersey-based Subaru, a James Bond-like command center complete with remote-controlled 10-foot-tall oak doors, egg-shaped chairs, a video surveillance system, and a goldfish pond. Nonetheless, Bricklin had his windfall, one that he leveraged into pursuit of the dream of building his own car. Just three years after his visit to Japan, and not long after Consumer Reports named the 360 the most dangerous auto on the road, Bricklin started shopping the concept of a gull-winged, acrylic-bodied, V-8 powered sports car designed by ex-Ford employee Herb Grasse.

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