[A 1985 Camaro IROC-Z squeals its tires, bursting onscreen to the sounds of Judas Priest’s “Breakin’ The Law”.]

BOSS TODD IS FUCKIN’ BACK, BITCHES!

You want an opener for the show? FUCK YOU. I got a team to coach tonight in a season opener. You get show openers whenever the fuck I feel like it. Right now I’m thinking about winning a fucking game. This year, there’s no fuckin’ 4-6 happening. That’s just midget Jeff Fisher dogshit. That asshole couldn’t even stick around this stupid USFL for more than a year. God damn. We’re beating last year’s record or I’m driving off a fucking cliff in my great-aunt’s Buick, I swear to God.

Now here’s a fucking car or some shit. Fuck off. GO SHOWBOATS.

THE BRICKLIN SV-1

Model Year: 1975

Total units produced: 2854

Vehicle type: two-seat sport coupe with gull-wing doors

Engine: Ford 351 Windsor V8, 5.8 L, 220 HP

Drivetrain: Front-engine, RWD

Transmission: FMX 3-speed automatic

Gross weight: 3520 lbs.

0-60 time: 7.2 seconds

Top speed: 107 mph

Vehicle cost: $7900 (1975 pricing; equivalent to $44,175.39 in 2023)

What makes this car interesting?

What if I told you that John DeLorean – considered equal parts visionary and charlatan in automotive history – wasn’t even the first guy to think of launching a space-aged, lightweight, and extremely safe sports car? At least this earlier vehicle didn’t result in massive, high-profile cocaine trafficking and fraud criminal trials.

The Bricklin SV-1 takes its name from American automotive mogul Malcolm Bricklin, who made a significant mark on the American car industry in the 20th century. Bricklin was the first man to bring Subaru to the United States, launching Subaru of America in 1968, and later brought the highly controversial Zastava Koral over from Yugoslavia in the late 1980s… which most know much better as the Yugo.

In between these events, Bricklin spent the early 1970s trying to launch his own car. The SV-1 – named specifically for “Safety Vehicle” – was supposed to be a new way of manufacturing cars. Designed with a body made of fiberglass and resin placed over a steel frame, the SV-1 was striking in appearances; even with a sleek, aerodynamic nose and wide tires, the SV-1’s most striking feature easily had to be its gull-wing doors. And unlike the DeLorean, the SV-1 actually drove pretty well – with a 220-horse V8 under the hood, it could actually accelerate well, though its top speed was limited – again, in the name of safety. Finally, as Malcolm Bricklin hated smoking and felt it unnecessarily risky while at the helm of a vehicle, the SV-1 did not come with a cigarette lighter or ashtrays. The car also didn’t use any paint at all – rather, the color of the body was set into the fiberglass and acrylic at the time of pressing, which was a design choice intended to reduce costs and expedite production time on all vehicles.

The SV-1 was constructed in New Brunswick, Canada. For those not in the know, New Brunswick is roughly the Canadian equivalent to West Virginia, with an economy based predominantly off of natural resources, chronic issues with unemployment, and a significant proportion of the population that continues to live rurally; it certainly was an odd spot to choose to build cars. But the Bricklin factory in Saint John was a joint venture with the New Brunswick provincial government, who were dealing with another economic recession and felt that an automotive factory in the province’s largest city would provide some highly valuable jobs for its population, especially as unemployment creeped up towards the 25% mark in the early part of the decade. The province kicked in $4.5 to Bricklin to land the opportunity, assuming that the money would go to startup costs for getting the factory’s production lines up and running. That number soon ballooned to $23 million due to cost overruns and problems with production before the government pulled the plug on the operation, and the company eventually collapsed into bankruptcy. With the goal of building 1000 cars per month at the Bricklin New Brunswick factory, the entire production run of less than 3000 vehicles in a three-year period was, in the end, a spectacular failure.

What makes this car stupid?

In theory, the resinated fiberglass is nice and lightweight to work with. In practice, it’s a heavy piece of shit. As it turns out, the resin used in bonding sections together was really poor quality, and also let in UV light, which further degraded the interior panels. As the bodywork was done at a separate facility in Minto, NB, about a 90-minute drive away, it was also really difficult to transport intact – due to the combination of shoddy production quality and poor provincial roads, there were some instances where Bricklin was losing up to 60% of the total shipments of body panels on each run between production facilities. Even after working out some improvements to the resin and transport, up to 25% of some shipments were still wasted by the company.

Next, the electrical system was really finicky to work with, with battery failures a common gremlin that customers had to deal with. Many components routinely shorted out, including headlights, turn signals, interior switches, and more. Pressing a button or flipping a switch was a lot like playing roulette – it would, at times, be impossible to predict what might happen next.

Finally, these electrical issues tie in with the car’s real big problem: it really wasn’t actually that safe at all. Specifically, the lack of safety is almost entirely due to the poor design of the gull-wing doors of the SV-1. First, each door weighed about 100 pounds, and they were raised and lowered solely on an electric hydraulic actuator. This system was so poorly designed that each door took twelve seconds to open all the way – and the doors could only be opened or closed one at a time, else the actuator be permanently destroyed by the weight of the doors and the stress on the electricals. With such heavy things keeping passengers in, a crash could very easily mean that they’d be too heavy for passengers to push or kick away from the rest of the frame.

While there are still believed to be about 1200 SV-1s in existence even today, the Bricklin company was doomed to fail. There’s still a cult following out there for the SV-1, and some are still regularly driven – one recent well-maintained example recently sold at auction for north of $100K. They’re weird, impractical and still oftentimes unreliable, but then again, so are a lot of football teams, and those seem to find fans in strange places all the time.

CAN YOU GET PUSSY IN THIS CAR? 

Pretty birds LOVE gull-wing doors. Don’t need to be a biologist to know that one. Ask me how I know. Might wanna prop them open with a few tree branches though. Don’t want an amputation cutting the fun short now…

How can BOSS TODD fix this thing? 

Gotta work on that whole power to weight thing again. So an engine swap seems like a must for me. Bigger problem, however, is that there’s no cool flame decals anywhere on this shit. You say you can’t paint fiberglass well? Fuck you. You’re not trying hard enough. Every time a wide receiver drops a ball in practise I make them take a lick off the insulation cotton candy machine I keep on the sideline. That builds MEN. Don’t like it? Make your fucking catch. Or punch your covering DB in the dick and make it look like an accident.

BOSS TODD out, bitches. See you in hell.

[The Camaro burns out again, with “Breakin’ The Law” blaring once more.]

***

Information for this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.