Visionary Vehicles, a venture founded by the entrepreneur who introduced the Yugo and Subaru brands to America, plans to import cars and trucks from China to North America priced at 30% below comparable vehicles.

Visionary Vehicles of New York reached an agreement with Chery Automobile Company to import 250,000 Chery-produced vehicles a year starting in 2007, Visionary said in a statement yesterday. Chery is owned and managed by the government of eastern China’s Anuhi province.

Visionary’s chief executive, Malcolm Bricklin, 65, will lead the introduction of Chinese cars to America. His Subaru of America Incorporated brought the Japanese brand to America more than three decades ago. He has since steered failed efforts to import cars from Europe and build sports cars and electric bicycles.

“Malcolm has demonstrated a track record of being a Pied Piper to draw people to him,” said the managing partner of consulting firm Brand Rules in Newport Beach, Calif., Charles Hughes.

China is the world’s fastest-growing automobile market. Automakers including General Motors of Detroit and Volkswagen of Wolfsburg, Germany, have led investment in Chinese factories. The rate of vehicles sales growth in China slowed in 2004 as the Chinese government reduced access to credit.

Visionary said it plans to introduce five types of vehicles, including an entry-level sedan, a mid-size sedan, and a sport-utility vehicle. The company is seeking 250 dealers, Mr. Bricklin said in Visionary’s statement. Visionary intends to sell 1 million vehicles annually after five years.

“This will be initially at the low end of the market,” said the director of forecasting at consulting firm Planning Edge in Birmingham, Mich., Alan Baum. Visionary’s vehicles will likely compete with the lowest-priced imports or used cars, he said.

The company’s targets are “ambitious, there’s no question about it,” Mr. Bricklin said in a telephone interview today. By importing from Chery, “You start with a state-of-the-art factory with the cheapest labor on the planet.” The initial 250,000 target “will only be limited by the amount of cars we can ship as fast as we can ship.”

Mr. Bricklin was the founding president of Subaru of America, an importer of cars made by Japan’s Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd., in 1968. Subaru today sells about 180,000 vehicles annually in America.

In 1985, he introduced the Yugo, an import from Yugoslavia that sold for about $4,000. Yugo peaked with almost 50,000 sales in 1987 and left America in 1992.

Mr. Bricklin’s ventures to build gull winged sports cars in the 1980s and electric bicycles in the 1990s also failed. In 2002, he announced plans to reintroduce Yugoslavian imports to America. They never arrived.

“My job is to set up dealers and set up a marketing program to create sales,” Mr. Bricklin said of his prior ventures. “You need a factory to do their job, to make quality cars.”

Visionary said it hired Harbour Consulting of Troy, Mich., to review Chery’s factories. Visionary officials have “been to the plant, but they don’t really know manufacturing,” said the president of the consulting firm, Ron Harbour, in an interview. “They called us and said, ‘Could you do an assessment?”‘

Mr. Harbour said he will visit Chery’s plant in late January for a two-week study of quality and other measures “to see whether they can actually do what they want to accomplish.”

One test for Chery is whether it can build vehicles that meet American pollution and safety regulations, said Mr. Hughes.

“This market does have some stringent requirements,” said Mr. Hughes, who introduced Britain’s Land Rover sport-utility vehicles to America in 1986. “They’ll go through a learning curve. The Japanese did. The Koreans did.”

Investment bank Allen & Company of New York is an adviser to Visionary. Mr. Bricklin wouldn’t say whether Allen & Company is an investor.