(first posted 12/15/2016) The Bricklin was the hot automotive story of 1975. How often does a completely new American car come along? Especially one that pushed all the hot buttons of the times: safety, performance, gull wings, fiberglass body, and very seventies styling. It could be compared to the Tesla Roadster, including the birthing pains both cars had. Well, and of course the DeLorean. But even before the Bricklin could be properly evaluated, it had one very serious deficit: its creator was Malcom Bricklin, a serial huckster who got his start importing Subaru 360s and later the Yugo. In between, really let his rapacious ego loose with the dream that so many have had over the decades: a car with your name on it. The results were predictable. As it was with the DeLorean. And many predicted with the Tesla.
But in 1975, there was a lot of buzz about the Bricklin, and Road and Track tried hard to be as objective about it as possible.
There was a lot of skepticism in the buildup to the Bricklin’s actual production, for obvious reasons. The biggest obstacle wa sof course the final development and production facilities. In a preview of what DeLorean would do in Ireland, Bricklin found his sucker in New Brunswick, which provided $4.5 in financing, much of which ended up going to its development.
Bricklin PR shot
Not surprisingly, both the intrinsic design as well as the execution of the Bricklin left much to be desired. For a so-called safety car, visibility was terrible. It was heavy, and many of the details had not yet been fleshed out. Even the gull wing doors didn’t work properly. There was no spare tire, as the design just didn’t accommodate one. It was in reality more of a pre-assembled kit car than a genuine production car.
Bricklin PR shot
Early versions used an AMC 360 V8 with 220 hp. R&T recommended buyers not get the Chrysler-sourced four speed manual, as its 90lb clutch effort was suitable “only for a masochist or circus strongman”. And the shifter effort was’t much better. And the Bricklin’s crude leaf-spring rear suspension has all the usual shortcomings like severe axle windup and wheel hop. Compared to the Corvette, its obvious competitor, the Bricklin came off like a truck with a fiberglass kit body. And not a fast one at that; its 0-60 time was a modest ten seconds.
And it took almost 18 seconds to trundle down the quarter mile.
“Mr. Bricklin is first and foremost a salesman…” ‘Nuff said.
I thought the Bricklin was hideous at the time. It even made the aging Corvette look great in comparison.
There’s a sucker born every minute, and guys like Bricklin were there to cash in in them.
A few years ago one of these popped up in traffic here in Birmingham. It was a faded, oxidized orange and for about a month I’d see it during my commute.
Then one day traffic was going slowly and I could see smoke coming from somewhere over the rise, low and behold, it was that Bricklin engulfed in flames.
Birmingham, England, or Birmingham, Alabama?
Definitely looks like a pre-assembled kit car. Like they say in the car business, there’s an ass for every seat…
I grew up in the Saint John, NB area where they were built and now I live about 1.5 hours away. There are still quite a few Bricklins that make the car show rounds here during the summer.
In 2010, a popular local theatre group, Theatre New Brunswick, made a Funk-inspired musical called “The Bricklin: An Automotive Fantasy”. That should give you an idea of how the whole debacle is viewed around here.
‘Debacle ‘ is the correct word .
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.Every so often one of these comes through my favorite Pick-A-Part Junk Yard, I always laugh, I see young Men look and say ‘ wow ~ what’s that ?!’ .
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P.T. Barnum must have been proud .
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-Nate
Between the gull-wing doors, fiberglass body and those awesome bumpers there was a ton of news in the Bricklin and everyone read the articles. For any car geek in the 70s it was a car we knew by heart including the famous engine change from AMC 360 to Ford 351.
There was a space race, then after that a horsepower race and then in the 70s a bumper race. Every model year from ’72 on had and list of winners and losers in the battle for best bumper. This Bricklin was near the top. It took soft blows as well as the GM Endura bumper and was styled into the body but it was also mounted on energy absorbing struts. I bet this was an inspiration for the Porsche 928 which blew everyone away in ’78.
I always thought of the Bricklin as the Father of the Delorean.
” GM Endura bumper and was styled into the body but it was also mounted on energy absorbing struts”
The bumpers on the 74 911 are basically that, they’re not endura but the execution is identical(and better) than the Bricklin. I don’t think Porsche looked too far for 928 inspiration… well other than the Pacer.
I guess I am one of those suckers. I had a chance to drive one of the first in the 1970s and finally bought one 5 years ago. With the many improvements – since this article was a written – by guys like Les Randolph and Bob Hoffman it has become a very enjoyable car. What has not changed is that it still attracts attention like no other vehicle.
Co-incident to Perry Shoar’s XT-6 post earlier today, it was Malcolm Bricklin who founded Subaru of America’s operation with the Subaru 360 in 1968. It was fatally ill-suited to North American driving conditions and he extricated himself from the company in the early 1970’s.
SuBarrru…wow!
And least we forget. Mr.Bricklin was also responsible for bringing that all time loser of a car to America-the unforgettable Yugo.
Definitely a con, but at least a Delorean type con that generated some cars rather than a Dale type con where the car never actually existed.
I got a kick out of the 17.8 second quarter mile time. My 258 six equipped AMC Matador ran a best of 17.7
I like the Bricklin, but only for nostalgia reasons. By any other metric, it’s a bad car and, except for the nostalgia factor, ranks right alongside stuff like the Edsel and Aztec as an automotive curiosity, but little else. Even Bricklin himself comes off as a shabby, bargain-basement John DeLorean.
I’ve often wondered if the “safety” aspect was there for any other reason than to apologize, at least partially, for the lack of performance.
I’ve always loved the Bricklin, ever since I saw one in real life. There’s probably two or three of them in town here, as they’ll park beside each other at the car shows. I always wondered why there were so few of them around, and what happened to the company in general. I had no idea that the fit and finish were THAT poor, though…..it is unacceptably bad. It would help to explain the rarity of the cars. However, it’s always easier to sell a good looking car that is unreliable, than to sell a mediocre/ bad looking car that is reliable.
For sure, this whole scenario is DeLorean before the DeLorean–selling an attractive sports car with underwhelming performance, and rushed into production. Bricklin was a huckster, but you wonder if he wouldn’t have been a successful huckster, had he had a better product to sell. Others would know more about this than I–was its price at the time comparable to a Corvette? If it was cheaper or comparable, he should have just sold them for more money (to provide better performance, weight savings and fit/ finish) and sold less volume.
I’ve thought that DeLorean (who is viewed by some as an opportunist with his company, especially the usage of Ireland’s labour) was crippled by rushed production, but moreso, didn’t have the cash that the Big Three has to weather the storm of problems. He found out that a huge amount of money is needed to test and troubleshoot problems. AMC fell into the same category with products like the Pacer…..rushed into production, and had killed their product since it never had the funds to improve the initial problems by any significant degree.
Good ideas without the funding to do so usually end up being troubled.
Reading the Bricklin interview, it struck me there was really no reason for this car but personal vanity. There already was a Corvette.
The primary reason Malcom Bricklin did anything was to make a quick buck. Which he managed to do, in all of his projects, because he put little or none of his own money into them and paid himself well from the investor’s money.
Vanity was second.
And to think Bricklin’s follow up was the Yugo. To be followed by the importation of the Malaysian Proton.
There is a pretty good biographical history about Malcolm Bricklin in “Yugo Rise And Fall Of The Worst Car In History” . Huckster, indeed. His financial machinations border on the criminal.
I’ve read three or four books about DeLorean. There is one about Bricklin called Bricklin going for $75.00 on Amazon. I’ll stick with what I can find on CC and the rest of the internet.
Don’t forget that he became the importer of Pininfarina Spiders and Bertone X1/9’s when Fiat pulled out of the U.S. at the end of 1982.
Terrible ergonomics, horrendous build quality and sluggish performance aside…I like it. I think it looks pretty good for 1975.
I say con job.
It’s my impression that the Mercedes 300SL and DeLorean had gull-wing doors for legitimate engineering reasons, but the Bricklin had them strictly for the wow factor.
Road & Track ran a piece based on one of their writers going one on one with both Malcolm Bricklin and his then newly introduced namesake car. Bricklin, questioned on the fact that the rear brakes were drums, said, “Do you want a talking point, or do you want the best brakes?” The R&T man’s perception was that the brakes could be locked up too easily.
Regarding selling a stylish, unreliable car vs. an unstylish, reliable one, VW sold millions of air-cooled bugs. But that was another era, with fewer choices available to the car buyer.
An engineering and marketing comparative analysis of the Bricklin and the Delorean would be quite interesting. if its a book, the epilogue can be on the Fiero!
A friend of mine has a Bricklin. it looked great from across the street. But the illusion broke down when one got close. The plastic panels were all warped and poorly fitting, and the interior looked like a low quality boat.
The supply of sleek futuristic sporty affordable cars was just about non existent. Malcolm Bricklin tapped into a viable market at the time. Unfortunately like his Subie 360 before, and the Yugo after, the cars he marketed did not meet the needs of the market opportunities he identified.
Didn’t the ’74 AMC equipped Bricklins come with the Borg Warner T10? The gear ratios listed in the report match those of the T10s AMC used.
The Bricklin used a lot of AMC parts. Even after the switch to Ford engines there were still lots of AMC bits.
I remember seeing a new Bricklin at a car show back in the 1970s and noticed that many of the interior parts looked like they came out of a Hornet/Gremlin. The Bricklin had Hornet window cranks, Hornet switchgear, Hornet HVAC controls, even the cheesy plastic Hornet floor shifter housing for automatic transmission. The front suspension was also right out of the AMC parts bin; identical to that used on Gremlins, Hornets, Matadors, and Ambassadors.
Bricklin was definitely a huckster. He swindled the taxpayers of New Brunswick for a pretty penny. Then again if not for Uncle Mal, we might not have Subaru in America today.
I was going to say no way that the front suspension was AMC, the coil over the upper A-arm is too tall to fit under the fender, but I did an image search and sure enough, there it is.
Sheesh, Hornet suspension both in the front and the back. Sports car indeed, I would rather have a Hornet with a 4-speed and a 360, it would be 500 pounds lighter.
Yep, the suspension parts are all stock AMC. I have a PDF of the Bricklin parts catalog and it looks like they took the pictures right out of the equivalent AMC book.
I guess that’s a good thing in that if you have a Bricklin you have a little easier time finding replacement parts. (Not that AMC parts are particularly thick on the ground at this late date, but at least they’re out there.)
The interior looks like something AMC would have cobbled together in the ’70s and promoted as the next “hot” thing!
I don’t think the dash was taken from an existing AMC vehicle, but it does have the AMC family look to it.
My favorite description of the front end styling of the Bricklin–looks like a shark trying to swallow an 8-track cartridge….
Or a wide mouth blues musician with a large harmonica in his mouth.
Didn’t Bricklin’s latest effort to bring Chinese Chery automotive to the US end up being a typical (for him) legal mess?
You have to hand it to the guy, he keeps hanging in there. I think poor old John Delorean ended up living off the charity of one of his old wealthy buddies in Grand Rapids, trying to get financing for a personal line of designer wristwatches (“Delorean Time”) that never materialized. In fact, the webpage for the watches even stayed up for a while after he died.
DeLorean was not a hustler like Bricklin. He had to hustle to keep his baby alive, but it really didn’t suit him. truth is, he was spoiled by the high bucks life of a top GM exec, and hustling was really below him. He just wanted to keep the party going. And of course, he had a massive ego.
Bricklin was a classic self-made kind of guy who just can’t stop, hoping to make another killing like he once did with Subaru.
Yeah, Delorean possessed a charismatic personality and demeanor who actually had engineering acumen and believed in his skill as an automotive executive. As stated, he was okay within the big money corporate confines of GM but, once he left that structure, was in way over his head as an independent auto manufacturer.
Moreover, he was also quite a bit the personable, front-line auto salesman who could woo in clients with his charm, but deferred to someone else as his hard-nosed closer when it came time to discuss financing, the best known being a fellow named Roy Nesseth. Nesseth was a shady character who was well versed in the sleaziest aspects of the auto sales world, going so far as once being the guy who orchestrated making off with a bunch of unsold Delorean cars being held for payment in a dock storage area. Delorean also had some rather dubious dealings with Colin Chapman and Lotus (among others) for which the legal proceedings carried on for decades after the final Delorean DMC-12 rolled off the line.
Bricklin was just a hustler who happened to deal in autos. Unlike Delorean, he didn’t need a ‘closer’ like Nesseth and, I dare say, was much more street-savvy. I would imagine Bricklin was the kind of guy who wouldn’t really care what the product was, so long as he managed to cash-in at some point.
The bottom line is you wouldn’t find Delorean on a street corner hustling 3-card Monte. But one could easily see Bricklin in that scenario.
Colin Chapman virtually redesigned De Loreans car so it could be produced and the result driven successfully,
Within the past year, I bought a copy of this 1975 R&T, read it, and then gave it to my mechanic — a performance-car enthusiast who has gone through more than a dozen Bricklins over the years. He’s of Italian descent, and once simultaneously owned a trio of SV1s in the colors of the Italian flag (red, white, green). Also within the past year, this mechanic had a cream-colored Bricklin pass through his hands. While it was in his shop, I had the chance to sit in it (although not drive it) and give Malcolm’s toy a closer inspection than I’d ever been able to before. I was not impressed.
To get an idea of just how shockingly awful a Bricklin interior is, everyone should click on the photo provided by Inspector Gadget, about 10 comments up from this one. Have a good look, folks. Just gaze upon that hideous hunk of injection molding around the shifter… and then notice the plastic doesn’t even have the decency to continue all the way back to the console: there’s a gap of several inches of carpeted tranny-hump separating the two islands of petroleum products. Worse, both these crummy-looking extrusions are fastened to the hump with exposed screwheads. Everywhere I looked, the Crap Factor was sky-high: it looked and felt like a project by a high-school auto-shop class. Utter rubbish.
I also noticed two things that are incongruous with a self-proclaimed “Safety Vehicle”: one which the R&T article mentioned (the seriously lousy rearward visibility, with its big bad blindspot); and one it didn’t: the needlessly tiny, deeply recessed, hard-to-read speedo and tach. This fault is particularly infuriating since, unlike so many other safety features, legible gauges don’t even have to cost more than illegible ones: just choose some of a decent diameter and don’t sink them too deep into the dash.
But then, if a manufacturer were serious about building a truly safe sportscar — not that most sportscar buyers give a flying frick about safety, as such drivers tend to be devil-may-care risk-takers by nature — they probably wouldn’t choose fiberglass for the body panels. Now, FG is a wonderfully versatile material — but if safety is really your concern, it’s not an improvement over steel. Steel doesn’t explode on impact.
…And, finally, here’s a novelty song about the Bricklin debacle, by a local New Brunswick broadcaster named Charlie Russell. The “Richard” the song refers to was NB Premier Richard Hatfield, whose government went down to defeat as a result of the huge amount of taxpayer money it had lost to a certain cowboy-hatted huckster from Arizona:
Malcolm Bricklin is a conman/snake oil salesman comparable to certain ex-presidents of the USA. The car was little better than one would expect from a conman, similar to steaks and get-rich-quick real estate courses and “universities.” Nothing more than a kit car made by a bunch of guys in a warehouse, instead of a guy with a set of craftsmen tools put together on weekends and late nights out in his garage.
Two turned up in New Zealand one of them was posted on FB in the last week still with its first owner, both still exist but I havent seen either live.
Scam? well more were built and sold than Tucker managed so it seems to have been a genuine effort at car production,
A born skeptic I admit, but I was when he first announced the car company.
But when I read a review (C+D?) and it claimed to be a safety car and thereby had only an auto transmission option, and a Rambler/AMC drivetrain? Easy call, this is all BS and make money or not, I’m not going near it with the proverbial 10 foot pole.
Disclaimer. While of age, I as not in the new car buyer financial status at the time. Not that it affected sales any…
Wild Guess: Younger readers have NO idea how desperate “car guys” were for anything resembling a new sports car/performance car in the middle-’70s era. There was the Corvette, there was “sort-of” the Pantera–imports ended in ’74 but I bet there were carryovers into ’75, there were antique four- and six-cylinder “sporting junk” from England. Italy made some pretty stuff that had no guts and no replacement parts. Folks wonder why Datsun sold so many 240/260 Z cars–and a bunch of them have been converted to proper V-8 power.
Bricklin was selling an anti-Brougham. That–all by itself–guaranteed some amount of interest in the marketplace. “Brougham” infected nearly everything at that time. You could hit up the showrooms of the Big Three, and see essentially the same car in each one. Wheezing, asthmatic 90-degree V-8, 3-speed auto trans, live rear axle and SLA front suspension both with limp springing and pinky-finger steering. Styling was “drop a greenhouse on top of a brick”. They more-or-less “had” to sell “Brougham” styling ’cause they weren’t interested in spending the money to engineer anything else except some token clown-cars. Vinyl roofs and Landau bars were profit-makers, engineering something decent was beyond what they were willing to spend.
What Bricklin couldn’t do was shake off the Malaise Curse. There were no Detroit powertrains that weren’t doomed to half or a third of the horsepower they should have had. That was just another “fact of life” in the middle of the ’70s–the car-making corporations were being ground to dust between the millstones of the Arab Embargo of oil, (which lead the Lamestream Media and their pretentious, obnoxious, control-mad “experts” to blather on and on and on about how the world only had 20 years worth of oil; and it was going to be The End of Civilization As We Know It; EXACTLY like “Climate Change” propaganda now) and Government emissions and safety regulations. Add in a sickening Corporate inability to do things right instead of doing things more cheaply than possible. Doing things more cheaply than possible guarantees failure. Failure is a wonderful description of middle-’70s powertrains.
Speaking of dishonest propaganda…..
Enjoy your freezing cold Christmas .
-Nate
Car and Driver’s head to head comparison of the Bricklin and the Corvette didn’t show a big difference in performance. The Bricklin’s performance numbers were pretty close to a Corvette with automatic and standard engine. The Corvette could stop shorter, but was hard to keep straight while using that extra ability.
Con job. Go online and read about all of the investor lawsuits against Malcolm Bricklin since the 1960s.
Decide for yourself.