AUTOS : Romanian Wheels for U.S. Market : Imports: Florida company will offer two sport utility models starting at less than $10,000.
An investment group betting that Americans will forget the ill-fated Yugo plans to import a four-door sport utility vehicle built in Romania with a starting price of less than $10,000.
East European Imports Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., said it will offer the ARO 24 this spring at a base price of $9,828, including air conditioning and a driver’s-side air bag. It will also sell the ARO 10, a smaller, two-door vehicle, starting at $7,995.
Prices for the vehicles, developed for the Romanian military, are far lower than those of the sport utility models offered by Detroit’s Big Three auto makers.
East European Imports, founded by a former U.S. distributor of Subaru cars, expects to sell 20,000 of the four-wheel-drive vehicles in their first year on the U.S. market and 40,000 annually within a few years.
“It’s an inexpensive, extremely durable sport utility that will be great for first-time buyers,” said Jack Trotman, company chairman. (He is not related to Ford Motor Co. Chairman Alex Trotman.)
East European Imports unveiled the vehicles in Dallas over the weekend at the National Automobile Dealers Assn. convention.
The company’s backer for the project, California-based Intercontinental Technologies Group Inc., plans to invest $20 million in the state-owned ARO factory in Romania to improve production and quality, Trotman said.
A promotional video shows workers assembling the vehicles with hand-held welding tools and paint guns. It says the AROs are “handcrafted, just like a Rolls-Royce or Range Rover.”
The vehicles, which resemble Land Rovers from the 1960s and are short on creature comforts, use designs that are about 30 years old. Testing includes a 45-degree hill climb after rollout from the factory in the Carpathian Mountains.
