Source:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...tory/Business/
Malcolm Bricklin wants to sell you another car
By GREG KEENAN
Bricklin is back.
Thirty years after trying to turn New Brunswick into an auto-production powerhouse, and failing spectacularly amid a wash of red ink, veteran entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin has another ambitious car-sales venture in the works.
This time, the product is to be imported from China. They would be the first Chinese-made cars to be retailed in North America.
But should sales of the inexpensive cars and sport utility vehicles take off after going on sale in Canada in 2008, the ever-optimistic Mr. Bricklin believes the automobiles could eventually be assembled in this country.
Either way, the project represents an attempted comeback by an auto-industry businessman, now in his mid-60s, whose career has been written off several times.
Visionary Vehicles LLC, will import five types of vehicles made by state-owned Chery Automobile Co., China's eighth largest auto manufacturer. Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong has signed on as chairman of Visionary's technology and environmental advisory board.
Mr. Bricklin is best remembered in Canada for the gull-winged sports car that bore his name but never lived up to his rosy predictions.
And the late New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield was among those disappointed: The much-touted venture collapsed in 1975, after racking up fewer than 3,000 sales and saddling the provincial government with more than $20-million in unpaid debts.
The New Brunswick fiasco "was really unfortunate," Mr. Bricklin conceded yesterday in an interview from New York. "That was me, and labour that was less than automotive quality."
Nor is this project comparable to the Yugo experience of the 1980s, he contended, referring to the cheap, imported Yugoslavian-built hatchback whose sales disintegrated amid horrendous quality problems.
The Yugo, he said, was "a 20-year-old Fiat in a 50-year-old factory."
This new enterprise, Mr. Bricklin said, resembles more closely his success in importing Subaru vehicles from Japan to the United States in the 1960s.
"Every single car that I brought into the U.S. was successful."
Chery offers quality and low cost, the company said in a news release extolling Mr. Bricklin as "one of the automobile industry's leading entrepreneurs and one of the most experienced automotive importers/brand builders in the industry."
Visionary Vehicles will import five Chery-made sets of wheels � an entry-level compact sedan, a sport utility vehicle, a mid-size sedan, a sporty car and a so-called crossover vehicle that combines the ride of a car with the space of an SUV.
Visionary says it anticipates sales of about 250,000 vehicles in the United States when imports start arriving there in 2007. In its first full year of operation in Canada, Visionary expects to sell 25,000 vehicles, based on the traditional rule of thumb that the Canadian market is about 10 per cent of U.S. sales.
The plan is to undercut other auto makers' prices by 30 per cent, Mr. Bricklin said.
He and his partners plan to create a dealership network across the continent.
Italy's Bertoni and Pininfarina companies � two leading automotive-design firms � have been enlisted to develop the vehicles.
As for cost, the hope is to sell the cars in Canada for less than $10,000 apiece, about $2,000 less than the cheapest new cars currently available.
Selling 25,000 cars in Canada in its first year would be a major success for Visionary, but not an impossible goal. Canadians have been highly receptive in the past to new, cheap vehicles.
The original success of Hyundai Motor Corp. in Canada based on the inexpensive Pony hatchback in the 1980s led to construction of a factory in Quebec that was later closed after that auto maker ran into quality problems.
In addition to Mr. Strong, Visionary has recruited some well-known names as advisers, from both within the auto industry and elsewhere.
These include William vanden Heuvel, who is a deputy permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations, and Ron Harbour, president of Harbour Consulting Inc., of Troy, Mich., an authoritative automotive-consulting firm.
Mr. Strong, an environmentalist, is interested in Chery producing hybrid cars as soon as possible, Mr. Bricklin said. Hybrid vehicles combine electric motors with traditional internal-combustion engines to produce much more fuel-efficient cars and are among the hottest-selling vehicles.
Mr. Strong is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.
Visionary wants to sell one million of the vehicles annually in North America by 2011.
In China, auto makers have been tripping over themselves to build assembly plants. And while the cars remain aimed chiefly at the domestic market, industry observers expect them to be exported in large quantities later this decade.
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