Import wannabes have trolled for dealers at NADA conventions

During the 1985 NADA convention in San Francisco, curious dealers boarded chartered buses to a broadcast studio. They wanted to see the communist-built car touted by Malcolm Bricklin, the man who had introduced Subaru vehicles to the United States.

They found a squat econobox called the Yugo. In a book by Jason Vuic, The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, Tony Ciminera, a former manager at Road & Track magazine who became one of Bricklin's associates at Yugo America, described the scene:

"We brought the cars in there and lit them up. They must have had thousands of lights in the ceilings like any studio would have, so the cars were lit up magnificently like at auto shows, only better. ... It was quite spectacular. The dealers really came ... in crowds.

"We had round tables of 10 with a Yugo executive at each who put on a little presentation, about how much they would make, what the profits were, and so on. At the end of the presentation the dealers were asked to write a check, which they did. There were so many checks, we had to get a cardboard box to put them all in."

The Yugo's bargain-basement price tag of $3,990 grabbed public attention, and sales of 35,959 Yugos in 1986 opened the floodgates. The 1987 NADA convention in Las Vegas was chockablock with would-be importers who touted their cars and trucks to dealers as the next Honda brand.

The annual NADA convention has long been the event of choice for vehicle manufacturers and modifiers seeking dealers, including kit-car makers and niche brands.

The mid- to late 1980s were the glory years for obscure import brands -- many of which never launched sales in the United States -- to troll for dealers.

Consider the companies and vehicles on display during the convention in Las Vegas in 1987:

n At Caesars Palace, Universal Motors of North America showed a four-wheel-drive vehicle from Spain, another from Portugal and two vehicles from India.

• Parked near a crosswalk was the Dallas, a French fiberglass-bodied front-wheel-drive SUV. 
• At the Imperial Palace Hotel, Roman Motor Corp. displayed a Romanian-built SUV and a sedan with styling similar to that of the Fiat-derived Yugo. Both would be ready for sale the next spring, the company pledged. A half-page ad in Automotive News screamed: "Don't let this new car and truck distributorship pass you by!"
• Global Motors, Bricklin's latest enterprise, combined the Yugo -- which the company said would soon add a convertible to the lineup -- with the Malaysian-built Proton Saga in a single franchise. 

To those unfamiliar with the second nameplate, an advertisement in Automotive News explained with geographic license: "This is the Proton Saga. It is made in South East Asia, like the Hyundai." It was to go on sale in 1988 at a base price of less than $5,000.

Yugo sales peaked at 48,812 units in 1987. Word of mouth about the car's lousy quality eventually killed it; sales plummeted to 1,412 vehicles in 1992.

But the Yugo's fortunes didn't stop other wannabe manufacturers from trying to sign up dealers at the NADA convention. In 1989, Kelpie Industries showed a mock version of the Australian company's pickup.

No production model was available, but the automaker insisted that assembly would begin at a Monterrey, Mexico, plant the next spring, using components largely obtained from Chrysler.

The pickup's salient selling feature: Its cargo bed could lower to the ground. An observer suggested that farm animals could walk into the pickup's bed.

Also in 1989, LaForza Automobiles said during the NADA convention that it had reached agreements with 23 dealers for its Italian-built SUV and was processing a dozen more. LaForza didn't get into gear that year.

The manufacturer tried again in 1998, signing an importing and marketing deal with an Escondido, Calif., company that also modified sports cars under the name Monster Motorsports. The U.S. company was to take the LaForza chassis and add a Ford powertrain.

The company said it expected to sell 100 of the $59,500 luxury SUVs in 1998 and 300 in 2000, after it met federal emissions and safety requirements for U.S. sales. The company also was trying to unload an inventory of 100 leftover 1989 LaForza rolling chassis, then stored in a Detroit warehouse, bought from LaForza Automobiles -- which was by then bankrupt.

Though its challenges made success look daunting, the California company said it had signed agreements with dealers in Orlando, San Francisco and Bellevue, Wash.

Also in 1998, executives of Eurasia Motor Corp. showed off a drawing of the Rage, a small SUV built in South Africa, at a booth on the convention floor. Eurasia, of Corpus Christi, Texas, at the time had no prototype of the SUV, no engine supplier, no tooling and none of the government certifications needed to sell a vehicle in the U.S. Nonetheless, CEO Howard Patterson said Eurasia had signed 50 dealers already and would have a vehicle on sale no later than that fall.

At the 2007 NADA convention in Las Vegas, the distributor China American Cooperative Automotive Inc. showed a pickup and SUV that it planned to import from China. A little over a year later, the Chinese automaker that was to supply the vehicles had cut its ties.

The distributor, known as Chamco, was in disarray after a boardroom coup and a flurry of lawsuits. That left 37 dealers who had paid franchise fees of as much as $300,000 wondering whether they would see their money again.

Similarly, dealers who signed up for a Mahindra franchise at an NADA convention were later left in the cold.

In 2011, Wheego courted dealers from a convention booth for its highway-capable LiFe electric vehicle. The company aimed its pitch of "at least have something to sell" at dealers who had lost their franchises during the Great Recession and the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors.

The NADA convention, as the single-largest gathering of ever-optimistic U.S. dealers, remains a great place for foreign automakers and local distributors to try to sign up dealers and create a distribution network.

But some dealers remember not only 1985, when they first saw the Yugo, but also 1989, when the company declared bankruptcy -- in the midst of that year's NADA convention.

Lindsay Chappell contributed to this report.