Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website. Yesterday, Jason wrote about how Mattel is finally going to make the 1985 Proton Saga into a Hot Wheels car. While initially baffling, there is a good explanation for this. The diecast car maker has been putting together sweet scale cars out of its Perai, Penang plant that’s called Mattel Malaysia Sdn Bhd. I have hundreds of cars built by this plant sitting in a suitcase in my closet. About a decade ago I laid them all out on a bar in my parents’ basement. Check out this sweet picture probably taken by an iPhone 4. To celebrate this occasion, Mattel has decided to put Malaysia’s first mass-produced car to be built and sold by a Malaysian company into production as a Hot Wheels car. That means that you’ll be able to score a 1985 Proton Saga for your personal collection. I wish Mattel made more cars like these into Hot Wheels cars! But for some of you, the mention of the Proton Saga didn’t conjure up images of adding one to your diecast fleet, but of the man that tried to bring the real car to America. Reader mbricolage first fired off this comment: Responding, Yugo owner Matt Sexton told quite a fascinating story: Because “just import a car from an emerging market so that you can advertise that you’re selling the cheapest car in its class” is definitely an infinitely-repeatable plan. Sure enough, there are reputable sources backing Sexton’s story up. Here’s a blurb from the Los Angeles Times: The amazing thing is that Proton America actually did achieve certification for the Saga, and as I recall there were about a half-dozen U.S.-spec examples assembled. I have always wondered if they still exist somewhere, talk about a piece of Malaise-era automotive history! I’m a Yugo owner and a few years ago I happened to find a Proton America media launch kit on eBay. They had dealers signed on already and were ready. It’s really fascinating stuff. And here’s another article from the same source, explaining how the Saga was supposed to hit our shores in 1988. Analysts at the time predicted by 1990, 1.2 million small cars a year would be coming from “underdeveloped nations,” providing lower-cost alternatives to Japanese competition. Bricklin, the distributor of the Subaru 360 (Yes, Bricklin started Subaru of America by importing a dirt cheap little cars from Japan), Yugo, and creator of the Bricklin SV-1, formed Global Motors Inc. to distribute both Sagas and Yugos. Bricklin ended up selling his stake in Global Motors and just two years later, Global Motors itself went belly up, never delivering on the plans to sell Sagas here. This will be worth its own look at a future date, but we’re blown away by this. Where else can you read an article about Hot Wheel cars and learn some obscure car history on the side? So today’s COTD goes to mbricolage and Matt Sexton for this awesome bit of trivia. This nomination comes from our own David Tracy, who jokes that while these comments were made yesterday, there’s no rule that the comment has to be from today. I suppose he’s right! Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member. More Than Beginners Luck, And An Incredible Mazda Rotary Song: COTD When his potential dealers started calling for the money they invested in inventory and showroom construction, Perez made a deal with Mahindra. Mahindra eventually called off the deal, partly because of Perez’s false claims of Mahindra’s fuel economy figures and because Romania told Mahindra of their shady encounter with Perez. Now Perez can’t go to India, either. I haven’t heard from Perez in years. He may still be hiding in Florida or Georgia, because Brazil wants to lock him up after getting burned in the Crosslander fiasco. The man is now wanted in three countries. A good explanation might be that Bricklin wanted to hedge his bets by not relying entirely on a single supplier in case the relationship with one soured Regardless of how one feels about Yugos, Jason Vuic’s book “The Yugo – The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in the World” is an excellent read. Another one of his bankruptcies was the EV warrior, his scheme to take advantage of CA’s ZEV mandate. The idiea being to sell the E-bikes at cost and the credits that they generated to the automakers that wanted to sell cars in CA. My Uncle in Law was his Lawyer for some of his bankruptcies. Bricklin gave him a fairly nice Ford powered Bricklin and my Father in Law had a couple of Bricklins in various states of disrepair including one of the prototypes that was powered by the Torino (Jeep Tornado) OHC 6 “hidden” in the back of the storage lot for his construction company. Also, at one point, he wanted to bring back Yugos under the new name ZMW (for Zastava Motor Works), which led to a threat of legal action from another automaker And the Yugo/ZMW collapse was mostly fueled by legal action from BMW, who was not pleased with Bricklin’s wordplay.
