主题：【注意】一美国公司宣布年底就让中国汽车登陆美国 -- 老歪

稍微古狗一下就可以发现不少有关他的资料。我曾给奇瑞发过邮件让他们小心，但他们没有回信。跟这样的人合作是不会有好结果的。

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05010321.htm

Snake Oil From China

By Seth Jayson (TMF Bent)

January 3, 2005

The headline in the New York Post is the best: "Chinese Automobiles Heading for U.S. Shores." Add an exclamation point and maybe a grainy photo of a column of People's Army regulars, and that bit of hyperbole could have graced the front page of any cold-war American newspaper, or The Onion.

The Post -- and hundreds of other organizations -- are fascinated by the announcement by Visionary Vehicles LLC that it would be importing a quarter of a million inexpensive Chinese cars into the U.S. And get this: They'll be priced for 30% less than current cars while sporting a 10-year warranty.

Sizzling news, no? A big new threat to GM (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F), and DaimlerChrysler (NYSE: DCX), not to mention Toyota (NYSE: TM) and Honda (NYSE: HMC). Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. After all, doesn't this sound a little familiar?

Of course it does. This unoriginal concept is the latest bit of self-promotion from well-known automotive opportunist Malcolm Bricklin, chief executive of Visionary Vehicles, who surfaces about once every half decade with yet another answer for America's commuters. If there's one thing he knows how to do, it's generate buzz on a slow news day.

While the news treatments today are busy parroting the VV press release, the story is really much more interesting than that. While some view Bricklin as a true prophet, others -- including those who believed in his mid-'80s electric car company, or lost big bucks in his abortive, late '90s electric bike scheme -- view him as more of a snake oil salesman. Try a few Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) searches and see what fascinating tales come to light.

Yes, Bricklin started his career bringing Subarus to the U.S., but keep in mind that he left in 1971, well ahead of the success. From there, he founded a company that sold a few thousand sporty, well-liked gull-wing "Safety Vehicles" long before DeLorean produced his similarly fated stainless steel loser. Another time, it was imported FIATs -- a car that in my experience was always more than deserving of the putative source for the acronym "Fix It Again, Tony."

But Bricklin's greatest fame in the U.S. is as the importer of the junky neo-FIAT Yugo, which made a big splash in the '80s, mostly as a punch line for late-night TV hosts. You can count on similar jokes tonight and later, should these cars hit the shores. And Bricklin's not the only shady character in the story. Chery Automobiles, Venture's Chinese manufacturer, is a major player in China's car revolution, but it's most famous in the foreign press for its alleged design thefts. The firm's popular QQ is, according to a December lawsuit, a blatant copy of a GM/Daewoo design that hadn't even hit the streets before the knockoff was on sale.

To judge by Bricklin's past successes, the major automakers have little to fear from the latest venture. They're already moving production of parts and cars to those shores. Now, if they can just figure out how to sell cars for more than it costs to build them, they might put investors' minds at ease.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20050104/BRICKLIN04/national/National (you'll have to register first)

Malcolm Bricklin wants to sell you another car

By GREG KEENAN

AUTO INDUSTRY REPORTER; With a report from Reuters

Tuesday, January 4, 2005 - Page A1

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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.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/982199.asp

queezing a Lemon Again

Can reviving the ill-fated Yugo plant bring back Serbia, too?

By Katka Krosnar

Newsweek International

Updated: 1:03 p.m. ET Jan.20, 2004

Oct. 27 issue - The affordable-car guru who brought the drab, boxy Yugo to the United States in the 1980s was laughed out of the country. Now Malcolm Bricklin is back in Serbia, trying to revive the Yugo factory outside Belgrade and dreaming of a new assault on the world market. He’s got a $200 million joint venture with the government of the former Yugoslavia, namesake of the Yugo. The new models will still be small and unbeatably cheap (as low as $11,000). This time, however, they’ll go by a new name. “These will be fun cars that people will be proud to drive,” says Bricklin, who for now calls them Visionary Vehicles.

EVEN HIS SERB partners don’t quite know what to make of this relentlessly optimistic American entrepreneur. Bricklin made a fortune in hardware before getting his start in autos. He imported Subaru minis to the United States in the 1960s, before Japan had a name for cars. In the 1970s he built his dream car, the Bricklin sportster, but it went the way of the DeLorean. In the 1980s he brought the Yugo out of Yugoslavia, and rolling it out a second time won’t be easy. Years of neglect have left the Zastava plant a stark symbol of Serbia’s cratered road to recovery after a decade of war. Bricklin is gambling that low labor costs, a reform-minded government and a global fad for affordable little vehicles will make a success of the new models―a convertible, a two-door coupe and a pickup truck. “This time things will be different,” he says. “With a new regime there is a will to work at the factory, and we won’t have problems with quality and deliveries like last time round.”

In its 1980s heyday Zastava turned out 220,000 Yugos a year. Bricklin and his partners sold some 160,000 of them in the United States before pulling out in 1988, trailed by jokes that still circulate on the Internet: “How do you double the value of a Yugo? Fill the gas tank.” In 1995 New York hosted an art show of Yugos turned into toasters and toilets.

Times were even crueler at home. Civil war left the Zastava plant a sad shell surrounded by unsold Yugos and bombed-out buildings. Sanctions against dictator Slobodan Milosevic cut off the plant from world markets and new technology. “A Yugo is fine for short journeys in Serbia, but I can’t imagine people around the world buying them again,” says cabby and Yugo owner Milan Avramovic. “I worked for 32 years in Zastava and helped clear the rubble after the NATO bombs, but maybe it’s just too late now to rescue it.”

By 2002 sales had fallen to 11,000 cars. Zastava now has 4,700 workers and 6,000 others who are paid half wages to stay home. Sitting below a 1990 car-of-the-year award from Yugoslav journalists, Zastava manager Vladeta Kostic says, “We have been manufacturing the same model for more than 20 years, so we cannot compete with other carmakers. We don’t have the millions of euros we need to invest in developing new models.”

That’s why Serbia needs Bricklin. Since the fall of Milosevic three years ago, the government has presided over the sale of 1,000 state enterprises, closed four troubled state banks and passed dozens of laws aimed at kick-starting the economy. Yet GNP growth is still a feeble 3 percent. Vladimir Gligorov, a Serbian economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, says there are as many as 400 giant Serbian companies like Zastava, limping under state control and unable to find buyers. “Zastava is an enormous burden on the state, but unfortunately, many foreign investors are nervous about investing because the situation is still messy,” says Ivan Lujanovic, head of restructuring at Serbia’s privatization agency.

Lujanovic insists Serbia is making progress. Since 2001 it has cut inflation from 114 percent to 9 percent, and the privatization effort gets high marks. “I don’t know any other transitional country in central and eastern Europe that has completed privatization on such a scale or that has had the courage to close down its four biggest bankrupt banks,” says Francois Ettori, an economist at the European Agency for Reconstruction in Belgrade.

New Yugos could bring work to Serbia, where the unemployment rate is 32 percent and the average monthly wage is $127. Many Serbs think the West has abandoned them and are dubious of Bricklin, too. Lujanovic says Bricklin is the best hope for Zastava but has yet to prove he has financing. Bricklin says credit is no problem. He figures to have new models ready by 2005, and to sell 100,000 to U.S. buyers in the first year. “It sounds ambitious,” says Michigan auto analyst Bernard Swiecki. “But then, that hasn’t stopped Bricklin before.”