Car Spot: 1975 Bricklin SV-1

Brought to you by the same guy who imported the Yugo

If you’re a regular reader of my posts you know that I’m a lover of all cars weird. I’d have to be to be an AMC geek. This spot comes from Malcom Bricklin, importer of the Subaru 360 that I found earlier this year at AirVenture in Oshkosh. Yup, that car that was barely a golf cart and got hammered in reviews for its lack of safety. Consumer Reports said it was “the most unsafe car on the market”. Ouch! So let’s build on that which led him to invent this week’s spot the SV-1.

RELATED Spot: See why the Subaru was so bad.

Always the sales guy Bricklin partnered with the provincial government of New Brunswick, Canada, promising jobs and economic growth but like the DeLorean, that didn’t happen. Introduced in 1974 at a time when our government was coming down on the car manufactures hard to incorporate more safety features in their cars, it was packed and looked cool too. The SV-1, or “Safety Vehicle One,” was built on a robust steel perimeter frame and featured an integrated roll cage to protect occupants in a rollover. It also incorporated energy-absorbing bumpers designed to withstand 5-mph impacts with no damage exceeding government standards at the time. The body was a composite construction of acrylic resin bonded to fiberglass something Bricklin himself pioneered. And a bit a trivia here, he excluded a cigarette lighter and ashtray, because smoking while driving was too dangerous.

Outside of the items that Bricklin engineered, a lot of the parts for the car came from other manufacturers. The instrument panel consisted of gages and switches from an AMC Hornet while`the engine was AMC’s 360 V8. I remember my dad talking about the deal when he work at AMC’s Parts Division. More on that deal later on.

This car was so far ahead of its time and when production began in 1974 there were problems right from the start that snowballed resulting in a car that came off the production line in really bad shape. The work force had never experienced producing something like this and it showed. The acrylic body panels, a Bricklin first, proved difficult to produce consistently, with lots of them scrapped due to poor bonding and blistering in the summer heat. The one of the cars notable features, the gull wing doors were another issue. With just a single hydraulic pump to operate, they were heavy and took several seconds to open and close and could be overloaded if both doors were operated simultaneously. If and owner had dead battery they were pretty much screwed because the doors wouldn’t work.

All this made for a perfect storm making cost go way up and its msrp of $7,900 jumped up to just short of ten grand, making it more expensive than a comparable Chevrolet Corvette and pushing it out of the affordable sports car market. With the AMC engine it could do 0-60 in around 8 seconds. When Bricklin stopped paying AMC for its engines, he switched to Ford’s 351 Windsor and 0-60 times jumped two seconds. The added weight of the safety issues didn’t help maters. Things were not going well and the New Brunswick government had enough pulling the plug and forcing the company into receivership in 1975. Less than 3,000 cars came off the assembly line.

You’d think with so few examples built acquiring one would require a significant investment but you could find ones in decent shape anywhere from 15 to 40 grand. Never one to give up, Malcolm Bricklin, moved on to other ventures, including importing the infamous Yugo. We all know how that ended up.

Thanks for checking out this week’s spot. A sure head turner at any Cars and Coffee event. Come back next Sunday for another one of my finds along with some of it’s history. Have a great week.