Malcolm Bricklin
It's a long way from Yugoslavia to China. And Malcolm Bricklin has taken the roundabout route.
Bricklin, the automotive chimera who successfully brought Subaru to the United States in the 1960s and the Yugo in the 1980s, has been on a quest for the next great--or at least tolerable--cheap car. A few years ago, he thought his old plant in Serbia might be ready to crank out a more modern version of the Yugo--but aftershocks from the Balkan wars nixed that idea. Bricklin checked out auto plants in Romania, Poland, and India, but vast underemployed payrolls and substandard quality turned him off. Finally a Russian friend urged him to go to China, and Bricklin quickly struck a deal with a small domestic automaker named Chery. "Everything about it," Bricklin enthuses, "is 1,000 times better than anything I've seen."
Bricklin's odyssey might sound like a whimsical entrepreneurial adventure--except that virtually every U.S. auto executive believes it' inevitable that Chinese-made cars will land on U.S. shores, just as Korean and Japanese cars have. The quality of Chinese products has skyrocketed.
Bricklin hopes to start importing freshly designed Cherys by 2007--though probably under another name--at prices 30 percent below comparable competitors'. Bricklin's timetable would be extremely aggressive even for a proven manufacturer. U.S. safety and environmental standards are far tougher than those in China.
But Bricklin isn't the only believer. Investment banker Allen & Co. has backed his Visionary Vehicles. And Americans may be warming to the idea of Chinese cars. According to CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore., nearly 25 percent of Americans would consider buying a midsize Chinese-built car, even of lesser quality. "If I have to hire everybody from Lexus to get the quality right," he boasts, I'll do it." -Richard Newman
This story appears in the January 31, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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