China JV Ditched

Plans by Malcolm Bricklin's Visionary Vehicles LLC to form a joint venture with China's Chery Automobile Co. Ltd are canceled, and he instead wants to contract production with three Chinese OEMs.

Auto entrepreneur Bricklin says he has had talks with a dozen Chinese auto manufacturers and plans to meet with another 10 in the next two months in order to realize his dream of selling Chinese-built vehicles in the U.S.

“We're only interested now in building up our own brand, with our own cars, with three manufacturers that will build them exactly the way we want them,” he tells Ward's.

While Bricklin says Chery, with which he first signed a pact in late 2004 to bring Chinese-built cars to the U.S., may be one of the three firms contracted by his Visionary operation, he is frank about his disappointment with the auto maker.

“Last May, I started to realize that to try to convey the information to the Chinese company on how to do all the things you have to do for the U.S. market, (the product) was being watered down,” he says. The cars that were to be available in 2007 “didn't even come close” to the quality levels Chery and Visionary originally set for imports to the U.S.

The need to make a late 2008 or early 2009 deadline for launching U.S. sales of the models also necessitated the move away from the original agreement with Chery, he says.

Bricklin says he now is seeking other design firms and engine and transmission providers to craft 15 different models, five each from three separate platforms.

Visionary and Chery, jointly, had been working with Italy's Bertone SpA and Pininfarina SpA to design the models and Austria's AVL List to provide engines.

Visionary now is in talks with former Bertone and Pininfarina designers who have opened their own design firm and is speaking with “various manufacturers” of engines that already meet U.S. emissions regulations to speed up the government-approval process.