主题：【注意】一美国公司宣布年底就让中国汽车登陆美国 -- 老歪

多维社记者吴伟报导／继美国梦幻汽车老板布里克林(Malcolm Bricklin)率先宣布将让中国奇瑞汽车打进美国市场后，另一位名不见经传的美国汽车商谢尔伯格(David Shelburg)最新宣布，他将把中国的吉利汽车、长城汽车和中兴汽车进口到美国。与布里克林计划在2007年只销售一种中国汽车相比，谢尔伯格后来居上的举动更令美国汽车业感到“震惊”，因为他要在今年12月就让三个厂家的多款中国汽车登陆美国。(chinesenewsnet.com)

看来中国的汽车真的即将“杀入”美国市场了。记得纽约时报曾报导说，戴姆勒-克莱斯勒公司高级副总裁顾鲁伯4月末在中国参加上海国际汽车展时曾说过这样一句话：不管是美国大湖区也好，还是德国也好，那里的老牌工业区该注意了：中国的汽车来了！(chinesenewsnet.com)

顾鲁伯的这番话曾让满屋子的记者，甚至连他的助手都大吃一惊。顾鲁伯还透露，戴姆勒-克莱斯勒公司也打算从中国向美国出口小汽车。他说，该公司已经在与中国合资方进行商讨，建立一个出口加工厂，并将在今年下半年拿出具体方案，做出最终决定。(chinesenewsnet.com)

不过，与戴姆勒-克莱斯勒公司打算在今年下半年才拿出具体方案比，谢尔伯格的年内就让中国汽车登陆的计划，对美国汽车业来说仿佛是个“天方夜谭”，因为无论是自己的名声还是企业的规模，谢尔伯格都显得那样“无名无份”。但这位75岁的来自亚利桑那州的汽车商，却以这个令美国汽车业震撼的决定，令同行们刮目相看了。(chinesenewsnet.com)

曾在2001年组建“中国汽车集团”的谢尔伯格，当时并未引起美国汽车业分析师的注意。其中不少人一直以为，他可能只是梦幻汽车老板布里克林手下的一个经销商。一名美国汽车市场分析师说，他们曾听说过有这么一家“中国汽车集团”，但直到现在也没有太多的相关信息和情报。(chinesenewsnet.com)

据匹兹堡邮报透露，谢尔伯格已同中国三大汽车厂商签定了销售协议，这三家公司分别是上海的吉利汽车公司、河北保定的长城汽车公司和安徽合肥的中兴汽车公司。谢尔伯格还表示，他已同密歇根州、威斯康星州、伊利诺斯州、亚利桑那州、加州、新泽西州、宾夕法尼亚州和俄勒冈州的30家汽车销售商签定了优先销售协议。(chinesenewsnet.com)

同布里克林计划销售中国奇瑞汽车公司的QQ车型相比，谢尔伯格在美国市场的销售计划可谓“品种繁多”，从零售价仅有6995美元的吉利Solo小型家用车，到客货两用的“皮卡”Admiral，还有名叫Hover的SUV，而另一种名叫Alto的车款则计划在墨西哥销售。(chinesenewsnet.com)

已与谢尔伯格签定优先独立经销中国车协议的加州经销商曼德拉说，在完成销售协议后他便期待着首辆中国汽车的登陆。曼德拉表示：“我们认为其前景对我们来说非常美好，我们会看到一种美国消费者将会得到的质高价廉的汽车。”匹兹堡邮报介绍说，只卖6995美元的Solo家用车，既有冷热汽系统，又有动力转向，还有双安全汽袋以及其它的标准装备。(chinesenewsnet.com)

已做好了前期准备工作的谢尔伯格透露，第一批中国产的汽车最快将在今年10月进入美国，30家经销商将在12月正式开始销售，而这些小车和卡车的配件将会在近期率先登陆美国，进入他的设在菲尼克斯地区的大库房。在被问道为何要把销售中国汽车一事做得如此保密时，谢尔伯格回答说：“为什么要大张旗鼓呢？中国人可不喜欢太张扬了。”(chinesenewsnet.com)

但谢尔伯格承认，是梦幻汽车老板布里克林率先宣布将在2007年进口汽车的作法，让他觉得到了把他的即将变成现实的计划公布于众的时候了。谢尔伯格说：“我想，嗯，我现在坐在这儿，手里已握着两年前签定的法律合同，甚至我现在就有进口的中国车。真正进口中国车的家伙会站出来么？”(chinesenewsnet.com)

谢尔伯格在大谈中国汽车进军美国市场时，带着捷足先登的自豪感说，中国人最关心的就是他们的汽车将在美国市场旗开得胜，实际上他们从一开始就制定了一项庞大的市场推动计划，因为“他们想成为‘老大’，他们是值得非常骄傲的人，他们知道他们的汽车将进入美国，因为它质高价廉，但同时他们不想让美国人太没面子了。”(chinesenewsnet.com)

谢尔伯格的这番话，与戴姆勒-克莱斯勒公司的高级副总裁顾鲁伯在上海国际汽车展的“中国的汽车来了”的预示，证明中国汽车走向世界的时代已经到来。用纽约时报的话，目前中国的汽车公司以及跨国公司的中国业务，看上去都正在对全球汽车市场逐渐发起全线攻击。而来自那些合资企业的出口产品，也极可能会成为这种攻击力量的一部分。(chinesenewsnet.com)

无论是德尔福公司的刹车部件，还是江森自控有限公司的座椅罩等等，它们在中国生产的汽车零部件，正在越来越多的出口到全球各个国家。中国本土的汽车制造商如哈飞、奇瑞等公司已开始向南美、非洲及中东地区的发展中国家大量出口汽车。(chinesenewsnet.com)

戴姆勒-克莱斯勒公司目前与合资方之间的谈判也加剧了一种可能性的发生，到2008年，大量的汽车将从中国的工厂运往美国和欧洲。通用汽车公司的副董事长罗伯特.鲁兹说，他预计，在今后5年内，至少会有一家土生土长的中国汽车制造商将成功地把产品出口到全球各地。

想买国产车的各位，等等就来了。

而且是说当时年底的时候就可以销售的。

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2004-06-01-chinacars_x.htm

我也不看好。转的目的只是让大家看看，鼓鼓劲。老大回府啦？

不过看上面那个链接里的文章，看来奇瑞的情况更可靠一些，也符合实际一些。

在没有足够的钱以前，还是买老外的车。车可是除了房子以外的第二投资。

最好车上有中文

稍微古狗一下就可以发现不少有关他的资料。我曾给奇瑞发过邮件让他们小心，但他们没有回信。跟这样的人合作是不会有好结果的。

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05010321.htm

Snake Oil From China

By Seth Jayson (TMF Bent)

January 3, 2005

The headline in the New York Post is the best: "Chinese Automobiles Heading for U.S. Shores." Add an exclamation point and maybe a grainy photo of a column of People's Army regulars, and that bit of hyperbole could have graced the front page of any cold-war American newspaper, or The Onion.

The Post -- and hundreds of other organizations -- are fascinated by the announcement by Visionary Vehicles LLC that it would be importing a quarter of a million inexpensive Chinese cars into the U.S. And get this: They'll be priced for 30% less than current cars while sporting a 10-year warranty.

Sizzling news, no? A big new threat to GM (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F), and DaimlerChrysler (NYSE: DCX), not to mention Toyota (NYSE: TM) and Honda (NYSE: HMC). Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. After all, doesn't this sound a little familiar?

Of course it does. This unoriginal concept is the latest bit of self-promotion from well-known automotive opportunist Malcolm Bricklin, chief executive of Visionary Vehicles, who surfaces about once every half decade with yet another answer for America's commuters. If there's one thing he knows how to do, it's generate buzz on a slow news day.

While the news treatments today are busy parroting the VV press release, the story is really much more interesting than that. While some view Bricklin as a true prophet, others -- including those who believed in his mid-'80s electric car company, or lost big bucks in his abortive, late '90s electric bike scheme -- view him as more of a snake oil salesman. Try a few Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) searches and see what fascinating tales come to light.

Yes, Bricklin started his career bringing Subarus to the U.S., but keep in mind that he left in 1971, well ahead of the success. From there, he founded a company that sold a few thousand sporty, well-liked gull-wing "Safety Vehicles" long before DeLorean produced his similarly fated stainless steel loser. Another time, it was imported FIATs -- a car that in my experience was always more than deserving of the putative source for the acronym "Fix It Again, Tony."

But Bricklin's greatest fame in the U.S. is as the importer of the junky neo-FIAT Yugo, which made a big splash in the '80s, mostly as a punch line for late-night TV hosts. You can count on similar jokes tonight and later, should these cars hit the shores. And Bricklin's not the only shady character in the story. Chery Automobiles, Venture's Chinese manufacturer, is a major player in China's car revolution, but it's most famous in the foreign press for its alleged design thefts. The firm's popular QQ is, according to a December lawsuit, a blatant copy of a GM/Daewoo design that hadn't even hit the streets before the knockoff was on sale.

To judge by Bricklin's past successes, the major automakers have little to fear from the latest venture. They're already moving production of parts and cars to those shores. Now, if they can just figure out how to sell cars for more than it costs to build them, they might put investors' minds at ease.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20050104/BRICKLIN04/national/National (you'll have to register first)

Malcolm Bricklin wants to sell you another car

By GREG KEENAN

AUTO INDUSTRY REPORTER; With a report from Reuters

Tuesday, January 4, 2005 - Page A1

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Bricklin is back.

Thirty years after trying to turn New Brunswick into an auto-production powerhouse, and failing spectacularly amid a wash of red ink, veteran entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin has another ambitious car-sales venture in the works.

This time, the product is to be imported from China. They would be the first Chinese-made cars to be retailed in North America.

But should sales of the inexpensive cars and sport utility vehicles take off after going on sale in Canada in 2008, the ever-optimistic Mr. Bricklin believes the automobiles could eventually be assembled in this country.

Either way, the project represents an attempted comeback by an auto-industry businessman, now in his mid-60s, whose career has been written off several times.

Visionary Vehicles LLC, will import five types of vehicles made by state-owned Chery Automobile Co., China's eighth largest auto manufacturer. Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong has signed on as chairman of Visionary's technology and environmental advisory board.

Mr. Bricklin is best remembered in Canada for the gull-winged sports car that bore his name but never lived up to his rosy predictions.

And the late New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield was among those disappointed: The much-touted venture collapsed in 1975, after racking up fewer than 3,000 sales and saddling the provincial government with more than $20-million in unpaid debts.

The New Brunswick fiasco "was really unfortunate," Mr. Bricklin conceded yesterday in an interview from New York. "That was me, and labour that was less than automotive quality."

Nor is this project comparable to the Yugo experience of the 1980s, he contended, referring to the cheap, imported Yugoslavian-built hatchback whose sales disintegrated amid horrendous quality problems.

The Yugo, he said, was "a 20-year-old Fiat in a 50-year-old factory."

This new enterprise, Mr. Bricklin said, resembles more closely his success in importing Subaru vehicles from Japan to the United States in the 1960s.

"Every single car that I brought into the U.S. was successful."

Chery offers quality and low cost, the company said in a news release extolling Mr. Bricklin as "one of the automobile industry's leading entrepreneurs and one of the most experienced automotive importers/brand builders in the industry."

Visionary Vehicles will import five Chery-made sets of wheels -- an entry-level compact sedan, a sport utility vehicle, a mid-size sedan, a sporty car and a so-called crossover vehicle that combines the ride of a car with the space of an SUV.

Visionary says it anticipates sales of about 250,000 vehicles in the United States when imports start arriving there in 2007. In its first full year of operation in Canada, Visionary expects to sell 25,000 vehicles, based on the traditional rule of thumb that the Canadian market is about 10 per cent of U.S. sales.

The plan is to undercut other auto makers' prices by 30 per cent, Mr. Bricklin said.

He and his partners plan to create a dealership network across the continent.

Italy's Bertoni and Pininfarina companies -- two leading automotive-design firms -- have been enlisted to develop the vehicles.

As for cost, the hope is to sell the cars in Canada for less than $10,000 apiece, about $2,000 less than the cheapest new cars currently available.

Selling 25,000 cars in Canada in its first year would be a major success for Visionary, but not an impossible goal. Canadians have been highly receptive in the past to new, cheap vehicles.

The original success of Hyundai Motor Corp. in Canada based on the inexpensive Pony hatchback in the 1980s led to construction of a factory in Quebec that was later closed after that auto maker ran into quality problems.

In addition to Mr. Strong, Visionary has recruited some well-known names as advisers, from both within the auto industry and elsewhere.

These include William vanden Heuvel, who is a deputy permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations, and Ron Harbour, president of Harbour Consulting Inc., of Troy, Mich., an authoritative automotive-consulting firm.

Mr. Strong, an environmentalist, is interested in Chery producing hybrid cars as soon as possible, Mr. Bricklin said. Hybrid vehicles combine electric motors with traditional internal-combustion engines to produce much more fuel-efficient cars and are among the hottest-selling vehicles.

Mr. Strong is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

Visionary wants to sell one million of the vehicles annually in North America by 2011.

In China, auto makers have been tripping over themselves to build assembly plants. And while the cars remain aimed chiefly at the domestic market, industry observers expect them to be exported in large quantities later this decade.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/982199.asp

queezing a Lemon Again

Can reviving the ill-fated Yugo plant bring back Serbia, too?

By Katka Krosnar

Newsweek International

Updated: 1:03 p.m. ET Jan.20, 2004

Oct. 27 issue - The affordable-car guru who brought the drab, boxy Yugo to the United States in the 1980s was laughed out of the country. Now Malcolm Bricklin is back in Serbia, trying to revive the Yugo factory outside Belgrade and dreaming of a new assault on the world market. He’s got a $200 million joint venture with the government of the former Yugoslavia, namesake of the Yugo. The new models will still be small and unbeatably cheap (as low as $11,000). This time, however, they’ll go by a new name. “These will be fun cars that people will be proud to drive,” says Bricklin, who for now calls them Visionary Vehicles.

EVEN HIS SERB partners don’t quite know what to make of this relentlessly optimistic American entrepreneur. Bricklin made a fortune in hardware before getting his start in autos. He imported Subaru minis to the United States in the 1960s, before Japan had a name for cars. In the 1970s he built his dream car, the Bricklin sportster, but it went the way of the DeLorean. In the 1980s he brought the Yugo out of Yugoslavia, and rolling it out a second time won’t be easy. Years of neglect have left the Zastava plant a stark symbol of Serbia’s cratered road to recovery after a decade of war. Bricklin is gambling that low labor costs, a reform-minded government and a global fad for affordable little vehicles will make a success of the new models―a convertible, a two-door coupe and a pickup truck. “This time things will be different,” he says. “With a new regime there is a will to work at the factory, and we won’t have problems with quality and deliveries like last time round.”

In its 1980s heyday Zastava turned out 220,000 Yugos a year. Bricklin and his partners sold some 160,000 of them in the United States before pulling out in 1988, trailed by jokes that still circulate on the Internet: “How do you double the value of a Yugo? Fill the gas tank.” In 1995 New York hosted an art show of Yugos turned into toasters and toilets.

Times were even crueler at home. Civil war left the Zastava plant a sad shell surrounded by unsold Yugos and bombed-out buildings. Sanctions against dictator Slobodan Milosevic cut off the plant from world markets and new technology. “A Yugo is fine for short journeys in Serbia, but I can’t imagine people around the world buying them again,” says cabby and Yugo owner Milan Avramovic. “I worked for 32 years in Zastava and helped clear the rubble after the NATO bombs, but maybe it’s just too late now to rescue it.”

By 2002 sales had fallen to 11,000 cars. Zastava now has 4,700 workers and 6,000 others who are paid half wages to stay home. Sitting below a 1990 car-of-the-year award from Yugoslav journalists, Zastava manager Vladeta Kostic says, “We have been manufacturing the same model for more than 20 years, so we cannot compete with other carmakers. We don’t have the millions of euros we need to invest in developing new models.”

That’s why Serbia needs Bricklin. Since the fall of Milosevic three years ago, the government has presided over the sale of 1,000 state enterprises, closed four troubled state banks and passed dozens of laws aimed at kick-starting the economy. Yet GNP growth is still a feeble 3 percent. Vladimir Gligorov, a Serbian economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, says there are as many as 400 giant Serbian companies like Zastava, limping under state control and unable to find buyers. “Zastava is an enormous burden on the state, but unfortunately, many foreign investors are nervous about investing because the situation is still messy,” says Ivan Lujanovic, head of restructuring at Serbia’s privatization agency.

Lujanovic insists Serbia is making progress. Since 2001 it has cut inflation from 114 percent to 9 percent, and the privatization effort gets high marks. “I don’t know any other transitional country in central and eastern Europe that has completed privatization on such a scale or that has had the courage to close down its four biggest bankrupt banks,” says Francois Ettori, an economist at the European Agency for Reconstruction in Belgrade.

New Yugos could bring work to Serbia, where the unemployment rate is 32 percent and the average monthly wage is $127. Many Serbs think the West has abandoned them and are dubious of Bricklin, too. Lujanovic says Bricklin is the best hope for Zastava but has yet to prove he has financing. Bricklin says credit is no problem. He figures to have new models ready by 2005, and to sell 100,000 to U.S. buyers in the first year. “It sounds ambitious,” says Michigan auto analyst Bernard Swiecki. “But then, that hasn’t stopped Bricklin before.”

这样可多重保险。也只能这样了。

刚听说中国要出口汽车到美国时我觉得很自豪，发展到了今天总算不用靠出口几亿条裤子来换一架飞机了。那日本韩国都出口汽车，凭啥咱中国就不能呢？再看到是奇瑞的产品我就更高兴了，因为这公司有几个董事是我父亲原来的学生，他教了三十多年的汽车专业。所以想给奇瑞提个醒，布里克林成天给人告，跟他打交道得小心。

我给奇瑞的邮件是今年1月12号发出的，他们至今也没回，我也就没再去打扰他们了。毕竟这些资料网上都有，谁去古狗一下都能找着。想来也可能他们已经作过调查了，用不着别人来瞎操心。

卖车的呀，怎么可能不劣迹斑斑？

唉，就不说美国这儿的车dealer了

中国厂商出口汽车，除了要在价格上做文章以外，一定要保证售后服务，一定要在全美各地有足够保证质量的维修点。当初，拉达进入北美市场，也是通过打价格牌挤进来的，但最后输在售后服务上，车坏了没地方修，没零件，在便宜也没用。我们应该尽量和美国公司结成联盟，利用他们的资源建成我们的销售维护网络。韩国车这方面做的就不错，最近几年发展得很好，应该多研究研究。说实话我个人认为其瑞这步棋走得太早了点。用不太成熟的技术，很不成熟的车型，在不太熟悉跨国销售，缺乏足够资金支持的情况下，进入一个极其注意商品质量，售后服务，信誉，品牌的已经饱和的陌生市场参与竞争，实在有些急功近利，操之过急了。

总以为用低价把东西销出去就完了, 不知很可能就这样完了...

事情总有起头, Learning by doing 吧.