The first time Tony Ciminera, vice president of Yugo America, actually drove a Yugo, it almost killed him. The steering went out and he stopped just short of plowing into a tree. During another test drive, the seat broke as he was approaching a train crossing, and he suddenly found himself lying on his back, steering with his knees.
Ciminera was in charge of production and engineering as the Yugo was prepared for the US market. He prudently concluded that it was not ready for prime-time.
Yet the Yugo slipped through our borders and, after a brief sales frenzy, became one of the auto industry’s most dependable jokes. (How do you get a Yugo to go from zero to 60 in under 15 seconds? Push it off a cliff!)
The Yugo’s biggest problem was quality, which seemed to have been completely overlooked. The Zastava auto plant in Kragujevac, Serbia, had been manufacturing Italian Fiats since the 1950s. The Yugo, on the inside, was basically a generic version of the Fiat 127 — a decent little car. The exterior was of the grim “econo-box” style of design, but hey — people weren’t buying the Yugo for its looks.
In Yugoslavia, the auto industry enjoyed the protection of state subsidies. They never had to worry about staying current or competitive. The Zastava plant was something of a de-facto employment program, as six men performed what one could have easily done — by hand. Workers drank plum brandy throughout the day like it was coffee.
However, there was pent-up demand for a small, cheap, basic car — and at $3,990, the Yugo was the cheapest car out there. Americans worked themselves into a state of Yugomania when the car debuted in 1985. A few even bought it sight unseen. The factory couldn’t make them fast enough.
Thank huckster-entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin for importing the Yugo to the States. At the official Yugo debut was at Tavern on the Green, Bricklin predicted, ludicrously — amidst red, white and blue balloons and cowboys — that he could sell a million Yugos in a year. Instead, Yugomania screeched to a halt one year later in a blizzard of bad publicity.
Consumer Reports derided the quality, calling it “a sorry sample indeed,” and suggested readers’ money would be better spent on a decent used car rather than a brand-new Yugo. Yugo America was bankrupt by 1989. Political unrest and sanctions on the region ended its run as a US import in 1992, and part of a Yugo plant got bombed by NATO.
But the cars continued to roll off the line in Serbia until November 2008. Today, the Yugo lives on as a collector’s item on eBay. Caveat emptor.
The Yugo
The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
by Jason Vuic
Hill and Wang
THE WORST OF THE REST
1899 HORSEY HORSELESS
True to its name, this horseless carriage needed no horse to pull it, but it had a life-size horse head installed on the front of it anyway — so as not to spook the horses that then roamed the street, pulling the soon-to-be-obsolete horse and buggies. No one knows if the car was ever manufactured after its creation — let’s hope not.
THE GREMLIN
A super-popular subcompact by AMC introduced on April Fool’s Day 1970. Since it got great gas mileage in a decade of oil crises, perhaps its only real crime was in its aesthetics: It looked as goofy as its name, as if it had been chopped in half, with no rear end to speak of.
1971 FORD PINTO
Ford’s first subcompact car (manufactured in, among other places, Edison, NJ), the Pinto had a tendency to burst into flames when hit from behind, due to the placement of its gas tank. Ford, while aware of this problem, did a cost-benefit analysis and concluded that it would be less costly to pay off the deaths that could result ($50 million) than pay for an estimated $121 million redesign.
THE EDSEL
Named after Edsel Ford, son of Henry, the boatlike Edsel automobile, introduced in 1958, was such a disaster that the word “Edsel” became shorthand for anything that failed. A marketing disaster more than anything else, Ford hyped it with the mystery we’d expect of the latest Apple product — keeping photos of the car secret until its release, on what they deemed “E-Day.” The Edsel landed with a thud. American simply disliked the Edsel and its weird-shaped grille. The company flacks came up with a contest in which anyone who test-drove an Edsel would be eligible to win an actual pony. It didn’t work, but did give a new meaning to the term “horsepower.”
HUMMER LIMO
When an SUV just wasn’t big enough, the early 2000s offered the chance to ride in a military-grade vehicle stretched into a limo. A Friday or Saturday night out in Manhattan isn’t complete without one of these humongous bad boys blocking traffic, causing taxi drivers to honk and curse long into the night. The “fall of the empire” aura it puts out is confirmed by the fact that last week Hummer stopped production.
1960-63 CORVAIR
A so-called “pony car,” Ralph Nader deemed the early Corvair “Unsafe at Any Speed” in his book — it rolled over easily, and the steering column could puncture a passenger in an accident. Needless to say, that didn’t help sales, although Chevy did change the steering column design in 1965. Production ceased in 1969.