Would You Buy a Chinese Car from This Man?

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It wasn't until a chance encounter with a casual acquaintance in April 2004 that China came up. The man, a Russian who exported cars to South America, offered to set Bricklin up with a company called Chery, about which the Russian had heard great things. "I thought I was going to find some factory in the middle of a rice paddy," Bricklin recalls. Instead, when he arrived in Wuhu, he thought he had landed in heaven. Not only did he find a modern facility staffed by a motivated work force, he also found a man he now describes as his entrepreneurial soul mate. It was Yin, Chery's 42-year-old president. Yin had spent the bulk of his career in the car business with companies like Volkswagen before being picked to head Chery in 1997. Bricklin says the two of them hit it off right from the start. Yin told Bricklin he planned to turn his 8,000-employee company into a Chinese Toyota. "His dreams are even bigger than mine," says Bricklin. "And that really turns me on."

Bricklin began to see the fragments of his up-and-down career fitting together in a new way and producing something better than he had ever accomplished in the past. "For the first time in my life, after 40 years of working in this business, I know how to do everything I need to do to make this work," he says.

Even before Bricklin announced the Chery deal to the world this January at the Detroit auto show, he was working behind the scenes to ensure his story made as big a splash as possible. He was also conducting damage control because The Detroit News already had the scoop on the deal and was going to break the story before he made his announcement at the show. So Bricklin tracked down Keith Crain, publisher of Automotive News, the industry's leading trade magazine, to clue him in as well. At the time, Crain was lying in a hospital bed in White Plains, N.Y., recuperating from double knee replacement surgery. Throwing open the doors to Crain's room with Jonathan and his camera in tow, Bricklin walked in with a proclamation: "I'm back." "Nothing Malcolm does surprises me," says Crain. "He's like one of those toy clowns that when you punch it, it bounces right back up."

After the hardware stores, the scooters, the Subarus, the Bricklins, the Yugos, the used-car dealerships, and the electric bikes, Bricklin is pitching what he says will be his final endeavor. He forecasts that within five years, Americans will be buying one million Chinese-made cars from his dealers. The Chery product will be sheathed in Lexus-caliber luxury but will be priced 30% lower than its Japanese counterparts and carry a 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty. "We are going to produce better, prettier, and smarter cars for less money," says Bricklin. "We're not trying to see how cheap we can do it, we're trying to see how good we can get it."

Bricklin also wants to change the car-buying experience itself, taking what GM's Saturn division has accomplished and pushing the model even further. Bricklin is having Chery's 250 "Auto Shows," as he calls the dealerships he intends to build, designed to generate an experience. He envisions a multistory, glassed-in show room with over 22,000 square feet of display space, an outdoor movie screen stretching 100 feet, half-mile oval test tracks, fast-food vendors, and supervised daycare.

A Chery concept car -- a convertible created by the Italian firm Pininfarina, designer of the Ferrari -- won the top award at the Shanghai auto show in May. Bricklin intends to sell a version of that vehicle plus four other Chery models in the U.S. All are still in the earliest development stages.

Depending upon the size of the sales territory, Bricklin is asking each potential dealer to invest $2 million to $4 million for a Visionary Vehicles franchise -- an amount roughly equal to the going rate for Lexus or BMW, according to Gordon Page, a dealership broker in Tampa. The futuristic show rooms will cost another $10 million each, but Bricklin isn't requiring that these be built before the first cars are sold.

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