Dream Car

After a slightly overlong prologue and introduction, Dream Car accelerates to a thrilling speed. The car lore is strong here. Anastakis, a professor of business history, understands the broad cultural currents that shaped the car-manufacturing sector and gave rise to the Bricklin. This is an ambitious book of big ideas.

The crisply argued central premise is that the Bricklin failed but was not quite a failure. Malcolm Bricklin built almost three thousand cars in New Brunswick, the first time since the 1940s that any manufacturer other than the Big Three had achieved that on this continent, “thus forever carving his name into American auto industry lore.”

This moment occurred, Anastakis argues, as the golden age of bold, archetypal inventors who sold North Americans the freedom of mobility was ending. It was the dawn of a new era marked by cold, bottom-line profiteering, reliance on government subsidies and bailouts, and concerns about the safety and environmental impact of the automobile.

There were, of course, inherent contradictions. Hatfield wanted well-paying manufacturing jobs; Bricklin sought low-cost labour. To launch his company, Bricklin played the role of a swashbuckling, innovative cowboy; but to make it succeed he needed to be a conventional, straitlaced, by-the-numbers manager. That eluded him, and it continued to elude him for decades after as he leapt from one faddish venture to another.

Still, as Anastakis shows in a chapter titled “Demise (Rebirth),” the Bricklin moment was unforgettable. The name became synonymous with failed government job-creation schemes, but today hundreds of Bricklin owners lovingly maintain their cars. Last fall, dozens of them from around the world gathered in Saint John, New Brunswick, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the car and to tour the one-time manufacturing plant where it was built.

Bricklin himself continues to explore new opportunities and has met with the man to whom he was a “spiritual precursor,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk. As for Hatfield, Anastakis traces his scandal-ridden political demise; but, unfortunately, he barely nods at the late premier’s own grudging rehabilitation in New Brunswick — now that history has come to focus more on his continuation of major social reforms, his support for official bilingualism, and his moderate Tory government.

The final reckoning for the Bricklin saga is that, five decades later, it provides rich raw material for an astute and able historian like Anastakis. New Brunswick lost $23 million in the deal, and the province wasn’t modernized in the way its flamboyant premier had hoped. But, by the metrics of myth and cool, it got back far more than it invested — and it got a great story. Hatfield surely would consider that a success.