About cars, I am not into that, so do not have much to add either. However, I just remember that I happened to run across a Bricklin recently while traveling in New Brunswick, and did take some photos of it. Surely, some people here would remember the Canadian-made Bricklin which was said to be the inspiration for the DeLorean.
Wikipedia said that less than 3,000 Bricklins were made before the company went bankrupt with much controversy involving the then Premier of NB Province. The car I saw had the serial number of 1956. It was said that each car cost $16K to make in 1975 ($68K in 2014 dollars), but was sold for only $5K to be price competitive.
I've heard of the Bricklin, but have never seen one in person. I'm surprised they cut the price to $5,000. Even though 1975 was a long time ago, $5,000 didn't really get you a whole lot of car back then. My grandparents bought a new Dodge Dart Swinger that year, and my Mom bought a new Pontiac LeMans coupe. Each of those was around $5,000.
I used to think it was weird that a 6-cyl compact and a V-8 mid-size would be so close in price, but one day I looked them up in an old car book. A slant-6 Swinger was around $3510 base price and a V-8 LeMans was around $3590. So, by the time you added a things we take for granted today, but were optional in those days, such as power steering, power brakes, a radio (I think even AM was still optional), air conditioning, and so on, it was easy to get them to around $5K.
According to Wikipedia, the '74 Bricklin used an AMC 360 V-8, while the '75-76 used a Ford 351. I'm surprised they'd use a 360 as the basis for a sports car. I'm not too up on my AMC engines, but by '74, I don't think there were any really high performance versions of the 360 around. My uncle had one, in a 1976 Jeep pickup. It was good for pulling tree stumps, and off-roading, but was anything BUT fast.
I don't think Ford was getting much performance out of the 351 by '75-76 either, but at least that was a lighter, smaller engine, and better suited to an exotic car.
Interestingly though, the Wikipedia article said that road tests of the time showed the Bricklin compared favorably to the Corvette. So maybe Bricklin took those boat-anchor engines and hopped them up some? Plus, by that time, Corvette performance had really fallen off. Around the '74-75 timeframe, the fastest US production car was not the Corvette, not the Camaro or Firebird, but, get this...the Dodge Dart Sport/Plymouth Duster, with the high-output Mopar 360 (not to be confused with the AMC 360, which was a totally different engine)