Epic fail: the gullwing-doored 1974 Bricklin SV-1

At its launch in 1974, founder Malcolm Bricklin heralded his new sportscar 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.

Build quality was broadly absent. The revolutionary fibreglass panels wrapped round the SV-1’s steel chassis set new standards when it came to ‘spectacular warping’, cleverly discouraging owners from driving their Bricklin in the rain. The pop-up headlights generally... wouldn’t, thus discouraging owners from driving at night. And when the SV-1 actually drove, it did so slowly, making it tricky to have a high speed crash.

Despite Bricklin promising to build 12,000 cars a year, fewer than 3,000 SV-1s were produced before the company went bankrupt. Which, of course, proved the smartest safety feature of all. What car could possibly be safer than one you can’t actually buy?