1985–1991 Yugo GV

[Eric]

People made fun of the Edsel—Ford’s $400 million dollar mistake—but its resemblance to a chrome-splattered bus station urinal aside, at least the Edsel worked. Though hideous, you could count on the mechanicals underneath the skin, which were solidly Ford and thus as good as any other car of the era. The dreadful Yugo, on the other hand, was both hard to view on a full stomach and an out-and-out vile little car that stretched the most generous usage of such terms as “shoddy” and “slapped together.”

This car was less reliable than the exchange rate of an African “people’s republic” or a Haliburton financial disclosure.

When it was introduced to American buyers in 1985, the Yugo was touted as the least-expensive new car on the market, with an alluring manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of just $3,999, which was thousands less than competitor models from American and Japanese automakers. Unfortunately, it turned out the Yugo was anything but a bargain, teaching folks the hard way about getting what you pay for.

In this case, what buyers got was a really bad copy of an out-of-date Fiat whose engineering specifications seemed to have been whipped out after an all-night session of Stolichnaya shooters by the nogoodnicks of Soviet Bloc Yugoslavian automaker Zavodi Crvena Zastava, which began manufacturing passenger vehicles for Soviet satellites in the mid-1950s.

So long as the Iron Curtain held, Western buyers were safe. But as the political climate began to lighten up in the client states of the ossifying Soviet Union, auto-industry wheeler-dealer and ex-Subaru importer Malcolm Bricklin (already infamous for his SVI “safety car”) saw an opportunity to bring what he called a “simple, low-cost car” to the American marketplace. The parts about “simple” and “low cost” were true enough—but the same could be said of a 2x4 or a cinder block. Full disclosure should have included some other adjectives.

Initial demand for the cars was strong, and the 90 U.S. Yugo dealers that sprang up were accepting checks from people who had not yet even seen the cars, let alone driven one.

They should have waited.

The Yugo will likely hold in perpetual ignominy the title of “Worst Car Ever Sold to the American Public.” Some broke down within a few miles of leaving the dealership lot—before the ink was even dry on the sales contract. Few ran for very long without developing expensive, systemic problems ranging from premature engine failure to Superfund-level oil-burning. It wasn’t so much a problem of defects plaguing the car as the car itself being a totality of defective engineering.

In 1999, during operations against Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, NATO jets bombed the Zastava plant in the former Yugoslavia where Yugos were still being built (surely one of the most successful results of the NATO action). Unfortunately, the tooling for the cars was reportedly saved, and there’s an ugly rumor floating around that Yugo—perhaps with help from Malcolm Bricklin—may make another attempt at bringing the precision engineering and build quality of an ex-Soviet republic back to the West.

For more, see: http://www.amazon.com/Automotive-Atr...5114803#reader

[Adam]

Eric and Friends;

I bought a Yugo back in 1985. What the hell was I thinking? It lasted exactly 6 months and it was a bloodbath for me when I traded it into the dealer for one of the best vechicles I ever owned a Mazda B2200 pickup.
The Yugo was a deathtrap. My thinking was back then that this Yugo would be cheap and affordable go to work car. Nobody warned me that the car would overheat at speeds over 70 mph. I had to sit on the side of the road and wait for it to cool down. One time I had a bigman in my car with me and we ended up getting a flat.
On the other hand the car kind of put me on the road map in life. Till this day some people can't remember my name but call me by my nickname Yugo Man. I remember my coworkers all wanting a turn at riding around the block with me. The car was such an egima at the time. I remember turning babes heads just so they could laugh or smile. It made me sort of infamous but still my pocket book feels it till this day when I traded that Yugo in for a real vehicle.

[grouch]

The Yugo was communist reverse engineering at it's most notorious. Prewar Packards became Soviet limos and the Yugo was a cheap knock off of a cheap car to begin with. BMW motorcycles were also knocked off with Soviet and Chinese military bikes being direct copies.