"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.
The Bricklin Safety-Vehicle, or SV-1, would sell for $9,000 and never dent or need paint. Bricklin acknowledges he didn't possess the expertise required to build a car. What he did know was that he wanted to make one that was "sexy," and that sex appeal was going to be the primary selling point. After striking out in his pitch to the Big Three, Bricklin found a champion in Richard Bennett Hatfield, premier of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Hatfield helped Bricklin secure more than $20 million from the Canadian government to sponsor the first new car manufacturer in North America in over a century.
And it was that chance to build something new -- even something as risky as a new car -- that attracted people like Terry Tanner. Bricklin recruited Tanner from Ford to be the chief engineering manager for Bricklin Motors, a job Tanner says his wife thought he was crazy to take. For someone used to working as a cog in an assembly line, Tanner says, Bricklin's dream "to build a stupid car" was irresistible. Plus, "Malcolm could motivate a rock," he says. Most cars take seven years to get built: The Bricklin came together in seven months. But, like fellow stargazers Preston Tucker and John DeLorean, Bricklin couldn't make his car of the future go. Despite a classic Bricklin promotional effort -- including a launch party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan at which he actually used a branding iron to burn a giant B into the first car to come off the production line -- the company couldn't generate cash fast enough to satisfy its creditors. The factory closed its doors in September 1975 after only about 3,000 cars were produced. Tanner remains proud of the car he and his team cobbled together in less than a year. He later started a business in rural Virginia servicing Bricklins; 2,123 of them are still on the road today. "The car was a success," he says. "It was the business that failed." Bricklin, who says he spent nearly all his Subaru profits on the SV-1, was forced to declare personal bankruptcy and, for the first time in his life, confront failure. "It was the only 24 hours of my life that I was actually depressed," he says.
