Bricklin SV-1

This submission is in response to a request by . This photograph was taken at the Ottawa Museum of Science and Technology.
The Bricklin SV-1 was a gull-wing door sports car assembled in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. The body panels were manufactured in a separate plant in Minto, New Brunswick. Manufactured from 1974 until early 1976 for the U.S. market, the car was the creation of Malcolm Bricklin, an American millionaire who had previously founded Subaru of America. Due to Bricklin's lack of experience in the auto manufacturing industry, coupled with funding problems, the Bricklin factory was not able to produce vehicles fast enough to make a profit. As a result, only 2854 cars were built before the company went into receivership, owing the New Brunswick government 23 million dollars.
The original idea for the Bricklin SV-1 was a safe and economical sports car (the model name stood for "safety vehicle one"), but due to the added weight of the safety features, the car was inefficient and simply a safe sports car. The Bricklin was designed for safety with an integrated roll cage, 5 mph (8.0 km/h) impact bumpers, and side beams. The body was fibreglass with bonded acrylic in five "safety" colours: white, red, green, orange and suntan. The cars had no cigarette lighter or ashtray because non-smoker Malcolm Bricklin believed it was unsafe to smoke and drive. The Bricklin is the only production vehicle in automotive history to have powered gull-wing doors, doors that opened and closed at the touch of a button, as standard equipment. (The later DeLorean DMC-12's gull-wing doors were manually operated) Power came from a 360 cu in (5,899 cc) AMC 360 V8 for 1974. Later cars used a 351 cu in (5,752 cc) Ford Windsor V8. A high-performance V8 was chosen so that in case of an impending accident the driver could pull away from the potential danger. Performance figures rated favorably against the contemporary Corvette, which most auto magazines used as a point of comparison. The front suspension used A-arms and coil springs, while the rear used leaf springs on a live axle. For the 1974 model year, 772 cars were produced, 137 of which had four-speed manual transmissions. All 1975 and 1976 cars had automatic transmissions. In 1974 potential owners were given a choice of transmission and color whereas in 1975 there was only a choice of color.
In an attempt to reduce production costs, Bricklin attempted to bond fibreglass to acrylic plastic—something the plastics industry had not perfected at the time—resulting in a high failure rate and high production costs (some panels cracked while still in their molds). The acrylic fiberglass body was ahead of its time, still requiring further development. It soon became obvious that Bricklin's claims of a "high performance safety car" were not met by the production vehicles, although the cars gained a much worse reputation than they deserved. After all, it was still faster than a Corvette of the same year.
The cars tended to overheat, using a single radiator opening in the 1974 model, and doubling the size of the opening for 1975 did not solve the problem. Running examples today generally feature a retrofitted larger radiator.
It is believed that fewer than 1120 Bricklin cars still exist.[source: Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricklin…