The man who brought the Yugo and Subaru to the United States and built a gull-wing sports car bearing his name has a new project — selling Chinese-made cars in the US.
Chery Automobile, owned by the Chinese government, has signed a deal with the privately held Visionary Vehicles of New York to sell Chery’s cars in the US, said Malcolm Bricklin, Visionary’s chief executive.
It will be the first deal to import Chinese-made cars to the US, The Detroit News reported in Sunday editions.
Bricklin was behind the selling of the low-cost Yugoslavia-made Yugo cars in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
His company, Yugo America, collapsed in 1992 amid falling sales and production problems in war-torn Yugoslavia.
He also started importing Subaru cars from Japan in 1968. In 1974, he founded a short-lived Canadian company to build a gull-winged Bricklin SV-1 sports car.
Chery is China’s eighth-largest automaker. It was founded in 1997 and sold about 90 000 vehicles in China in 2004.
Bricklin said his exclusive distribution agreement is for five Chery models that will go on sale in January 2007. The agreement was reached on December 16, he said.
”The North American automobile market is complex, competitive and always changing,” Chery president Yin Tongyao said in a written statement. ”We are looking forward to working with Visionary Vehicles and taking advantage of Malcolm’s expertise as we enter it.”
Calls to Chery’s headquarters at Wuhu, China, were not answered on Sunday.
South Korea’s GM Daewoo Auto & Technology sued Chery in December, accusing it of illegally copying one of its car models, the Chevrolet Spark. — Sapa-AP