I’ve been waiting all morning here for someone to nominate the Bricklin, and perhaps spare me having to give it another fifteen minutes of fame, which it so doesn’t deserve. No such luck. Well, I refuse to spend more than fifteen minutes on this, so it’ll have to be the quickie version. Malcom Bricklin, who once happened to be at the right place at the right time with his decision to import Subarus, from then on suffered from an interminable swollen head syndrome. He tried to repilicate his success with Subaru by importing the Yugo, a tale just told recently here. In between those two, he did what every inflated ego does: try to build a car with his name on it. And preferably, with some sucker government to stump up for the inevitable losses.
Underneath the Bricklin SV-1 crudely styled body sat an old-school frame, rear leaf springs, somebody’s borrowed front suspension, and an AMC 360 V8 (later the Ford 351). The SV stood for Safety Vehicle. Being trapped inside it when the power-operated gull wing doors didn’t work was for your safety! An attempt to merge fiberglass with acrylic didn’t pan out, and there were huge problems as a result. The car drove like a brick….and the unhappy ending was inevitable. From wiki:
Under the direction of New Brunswick Premier Richard Hatfield, the provincial government provided financing of $4.5 million for Bricklin’s car. The money had been advanced on the assumption that Bricklin needed it to begin the production of cars. In truth, it had paid for the engineering and development of Bricklin’s car as well as many of the costs, including salaries of keeping Bricklin’s U.S. companies in operation.[9] Also contributing to the company’s decline was Bricklin’s tendency to assign inexperienced family members to executive positions on his Board. These included naming his father as Vice-President of Engineering, his mother as head of Public Relations, and his sister’s husband as company attorney.
During production, the Bricklin manufacturer was constantly in debt, and had relied on provincial government support to keep the company running. One reason is the vehicle was estimated to cost $16,000 to build, but sold for $5000 each to the Dealers, so the company lost the equivalent of sales of more than two Bricklins for every car built. To further complicate problems, Richard Hatfield was discovered to have secretly funded the failing company to win reelection. After the funding scandal, the government turned down a request for an additional $10 million to keep the company running. The factory shut down, and was put into receivership on September 25, 1975.
Ironically, the whole Bricklin affair almost perfectly foreshadows a very similar one in the eighties. You know the one I mean.
A passel of “safety cars” were built in the seventies, in response to skyrocketing death rates on our highways.
In ’75 NHTSA let contracts to Calspan and Minicars to build small cars that could handle a 50 mph crash. I vaguely remembered this, went researching, and found a very complete story from last year’s Jalopnik: http://jalopnik.com/5549518/how-the-us-government-killed-the-safest-car-ever-built
The Minicars result appears below, from Jalopnik. Looks like it has gull-wing doors too!
Looks like a cross between a Chevette and a DeLorean. Yikes.
I think you’ve nailed it Paul. I wish I’d thought of the Bricklin. The only problem is, you’ve almost doomed the DMC-12 to become the official 80’s turkey.
The DeLorean is much cooler than the Bricklin and deserves better than turkey-dom (turkey-ness?), and here’s why:
– A stainless steel body is way cooler than fiberglass.
– The DMC-12 chassis was engineered by Lotus. The SV-1? No.
– Gull wing doors are awesome, EXCEPT when they trap you in the car.
– John DeLorean gave us the GTO; Malcolm Bricklin gave us the Subaru. Who’s cooler?
– “You made a time machine out of a Bricklin?” just doesn’t sound right.
I almost forgot the Subaru 360! Are nominations closed for ’70s turkey cars?
I think the 360 came out in ’58. I’m not sure how long it was built, maybe early ’70s?
In Japan, at the time, it was a reasonable car. In American (saw my first one either in ’69 or ’70) it was a bad joke.
You mean the “Su-BAR-u”. There was an insanely hot girl who kept wrapping her lips around those three syllables in the first subaru commercials. “The little subaru. wow!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLPp-NFInXw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzvmPpXTAqM&feature=related
Mesmerizing!
I think the DMC also has a substantially more colorful history. John Z was on the cover of practically every magazine in America, the butt of countless late-night talk show monologues, and even parodied in Doonesbury. (Duke ended up busted by the DEA while trying to put together a coke deal to underwrite production of a DeLorean biopic.)
Shouldn’t Malcolm Bricklin get honorable mention in some sort of Turkey Hall Of Fame from his work with “Bricklin”, “Yugo”, and trying to work a deal with Chery (or whatever that Chinese company is.)
Didnt think of it we never got them though there is one for sale on trademe the local turkeys sprang to mind more readily I wou;ld have nominated the Trekka but nobody has ever heard of it.
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/chevrolet-corvette-stingray-vs-bricklin-sv-1-road-test
This is worth a look if you’re interested in what people thought of it at the time.
1975 must have been the low point, performance wise, in all of V8 Corvette history. C/D’s test car was equipped with the base engine putting out only 165 HP. That would be econobox territory today. No wonder the Bricklin held up so well in the comparison.
it looks kinda cool…..in a kit car/generic toy car way
Here is another mind boggling fact about the Bricklin – they were built in Canada but had no dealers here. If a Canadian wanted one they needed to buy it in the US and import it into the Canada. So our government paid a pile of money for a car we couldn’t really buy. Of course they argue they paid for the jobs assembling them I guess.
There are a decent number in Canada now though.
I still think the Vega should be the turkey of the 70s. Bricklin was an amateur who managed to scam a few. GM knew better and penny pinched on cylinder liners and rustproofing. They scammed over two million of us into buying a cheap piece of crap and suffered Karma (Carma?) because of it on June 1st, 2009.
The Vega wasn’t a turkey, per se. It was certainly a miserable POS for those unlucky enough to have bought one but, as stated, it sold very well, and stayed in production for a long time, particularly if the Monza which followed and its derivatives are included. It even won a 1971 C&D small car comparison that has been reporduced here on TTAC. From a sales/profit standpoint, the Vega was a success for GM (if an evil one).
The Bricklin SV1, OTOH, was also a POS but, unlike the Vega, was expensive, sold poorly, only managed to stay in production for two years, and fleeced not only the consumers that bought them, but also the Canadian government.
It’s a close call but I think I’d give the nod to the Bricklin on this one.
Ironically, it’s worth noting that John Z. DeLorean (who would later famously produce his own Bricklin-type vehicle) was running Chevrolet when the Vega was introduced (although he later tried to claim he had nothing to do with the car in his book, devoting a whole chapter to it). This may be partially true since the Vega was GM’s first ‘corporate’ car whose design and engineering was approved by GM corporate and not any specific division.
In fact, the Vega may have been GM’s way of getting back at DeLorean for the GTO, a car for which GM corporate still held a grudge against DeLorean.
I think the reason that the Bricklin was not mentioned is that so few people are aware of its existence, even fewer have seen one, and even fewer experienced it.
Years ago C&D named him the number 1 person in the auto industry you do not want to do/go into business with. Which of course is very true except for 1 person my Uncle-in-law, who was his personal and business lawyer through many of the bankruptcies, I believe starting with the Bricklin itself.
So I’ve seen a number of them up close and in personal. Not all of them were equipped with the AMC or Ford engines there was at least one with a Torino engine, not one out of a Ford Torino but the South American modernization of the Hurricane OHC engine used in a few Jeep products.
In all those bankruptcies Malcom often paid Uncle Joe with stuff from his house. So he has a very nice example of one that when I saw it years ago had like 40K on it. In addition there were 3 or 4 non running examples that were at my Father-in-law’s shop for his construction company. One of those was said example with the Torino engine, no idea if it was an early prototype or what. My Father-in-law also had a number of things around his home that had came from the Bricklin residence. There were 2 life size alligators made from scrap metal he kept in the back yard.
As to the bankruptcies Subaru stepped in took back his distributor ship and made good on warranties much the same as Yugo did. Another much less well known failed transportation business was the EV Warrior I know at one point my Uncle had boxes of the brochures for them. He was the one that did the legal work setting up and taking that company through bankruptcy too. His grand idea that time was based on California’s ZEV mandate. The thought was that he could sell them to auto mfgs who would have given them away to meet their ZEV requirements. Of course CA backed down on that ZEV mandate and the business collapsed leaving lots of Chinese made power packs un-installed on even lower quality Chinese made bicycles and thousands of said brochures.
I always forget to ask what every happened to those non-running Bricklins on the rare occasion I see my FIL. Of course getting one back from CO where they were when I last saw them would be a bit of a task and at today’s gas prices probably more than one is worth.
scoutdude, your account resonates with me. visionary vehicles was headquartered in an approximately $15 million townhouse down the block from me. tesla, on the other hand, is headquartered between auto repair shops and art galleries in chelsea.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/comment-image/13941.jpg
i also concur that, aside from the obvious parallels, delorean should not be put in the same category. delorian should be compared to tucker. bricklin is nothing but a fast talking crook.
I recently read a book about Bricklin and the Yugo fiasco. At the same time his dealers were going bust, he was was living on a huge ranch (which he had never paid for) and flying around in a helicopter (which he had never paid for). This came AFTER the Bricklin car flop-stravaganza. When he went into that, he didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to build a car. The car he sold investors on didn’t even have a drive train in it and yet he pitched and sold it. The conned Richard Hatfield who was, at the time, desperate to get any kind of job into New Brunswick he could. The real problem with unemployment Down Home was never lack of work, but Canada’s superbly generous unemployment insurance, or “Lotto 10-42,” which is a pun on our national lottery, “Lotto 6-49.”
You see, to qualify for unemployment insurance, all you had to do was work for 10 weeks. Then you could sit on your butt and drink Moosehead for the next 42. Not too surprisingly, quite a few of the Fellers down home did just that. Just as Bricklin had his staff trained, they all took off on Unemployment Enjoyment (as it was known at the time). This was the final nail in the coffin for Bricklin.
In fact, the UI system was so abused in Canada for so long, people had T-shirts emblazoned with the catchy phrase, “UIC (unemployment insurance comission) Ski Team.”
Got to love it! Thanks.
Ha, how could I have forgotten these things? They were built 20 minutes from my hometown. 🙂 I actually saw an orange one drive past the end of my street last week. They still stand out in a crowd.
Hatfield may have gone a little too far with financing this “endeavour”, but he and every other Premier of this province will do just about anything to create jobs. We now have a massive call centre industry here because of it. Of course the Canadian dollar is quite strong against the USD, so those jobs are slowly going away too.
The abuse of EI (notice the positive “Employment Insurance” name that was brought in a couple of governments ago) is still rampant and very irritating to people like me who work for a living.
Either way… I still want a Bricklin when I have a place to keep it.
Sure, it’s idle speculation but I wonder whether the Bricklin had any reasonable hope of success if its founder hadn’t been nuts.
For example, the basic design should have been quite affordable to produce if Bricklin had ditched the acrylic body and gullwings. Sure, the Bricklin wasn’t nearly as potent of a sports car as the Corvette, but that was also the case with the original T-Bird — and it sold better even before switching to a four-seater.
What makes both the Bricklin and DeLorean seem so hopelessly tragic is that I don’t see how either could have survived by only producing two-seaters. So might the Bricklin have both broadened its market and differentiated itself from the Corvette by offering two-plus-two seating, a sport wagon or even a four-door coupe variant? And given its Canadian origins, might 4WD have played to its safety meme?