EPIC FAIL
BRICKLIN SV-1
WORDS: SAM PHILIP
The-finest failures in automotive history
At its launch in 1974, founder Malcolm Bricklin heralded his new sports car as nothing less than “the safest production car in the world”. As it turned out, the SV-1 (short for Safety Vehicle) would indeed prove near impossible to crash. Just not necessarily for the reasons Bricklin had envisaged.
For starters, shunting the SV-1 required getting into it in the first place. Which, with a 41kg gullwing door to negotiate, was easier said than done. Sure, a hydraulic cylinder was intended to do the heavy lifting, but the mechanism would frequently fail, leaving owners helplessly trapped outside their $10,000 sports car. Which, with hindsight, was better than being helplessly trapped inside their $10,000 sports car in the event of a rollover crash. And if you somehow managed to finagle your way into the driver’s seat of an SV-1, there was still a strong chance it wouldn’t actually go. Bricklin didn’t only establish a whole new car company, but also a whole new factory in New Brunswick, Canada, a locale rarely referred to as ‘the epicentre of the car building universe’. This bold gesture gave the world a chance to discover what happens when you put construction of a very complex car in the hands of a novice workforce.