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  • The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
  • Rudi Volti (bio)
The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. By Jason Vuic. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Pp. 262. $26.

Was it really “the worst car in history”? Hardly, but the saga of the Yugo does demonstrate that the manufacture and marketing of automobiles is not something to be undertaken lightly. The initial impetus for the Yugo was Yugoslavia’s belated entry into the tide of mass motorization that had been sweeping over Europe since the early 1960s. As a communist country, and a poor one at that, Yugoslavia faced many obstacles in establishing an automobile industry. The Yugo, initially called the Zastava 102, was the product of the Crvena Zastava (“Red Flag”) factory, which in late 1980 initiated large-scale production of automobiles based on the Fiat 127, an economical front-wheel-drive car that sold in large numbers in many parts of the world.

The Yugo likely would have remained largely unknown outside Yugoslavia had it not come to the attention of Malcolm Bricklin, who began his career as a “serial entrepreneur” while still in his twenties with a failed franchising scheme for a nationwide chain of hardware stores. Bricklin’s automotive adventures began in 1968 with the importation of the tiny Subaru 360, a truly wretched car that was totally unsuited to American driving conditions. After some dubious financial dealings freed him of Subaru, he was able to extract several million dollars from the economically depressed Canadian province of New Brunswick in order to build the Bricklin SV-1, a not-ready-for-prime-time two-seater with gullwing doors like the legendary Mercedes 300 SL. This operation went into receivership in 1974 after a few hundred seriously flawed vehicles left the factory. Next came the importation of the Bertone X1/9 and Pininfarina Spider, sporty roadsters that began life as Fiat designs. Sales failed to live up to expectations but, ever the optimist, Bricklin was able to persuade a few investors to look past his two previous bankruptcies and to finance the importation of the car dubbed the Yugo.

Although spartan, there was nothing inherently wrong with the design of the Yugo; it was the execution of that design that led to its dismal reputation. The Serbian factory in which it was made looked like something out of the early Industrial Revolution. Overstaffed, filthy, and dimly lit, with little regard for worker safety and an indifferent management, Crvena Zastava manufactured a car that needed massive reworking before it could be sold in the American market. Not only did it have to be brought into compliance with U.S. safety and emission standards, it also had a host of defects requiring rectification—windows leaked, doors wouldn’t close, electrical accessories didn’t work, and on and on. In all, 419 changes had to be made before the car could be launched in the U.S. market.

At least some of these defects had been rectified when the Yugo first went [End Page 854] on sale on 26 August 1985. Customers came in droves to buy the car, entranced by its $3,990 sticker price, making it the fastest-selling European import in U.S. history. But Yugomania was short-lived, as the car’s poor quality became evident, underscored by the judgment of Consumer Reports that “Overall the Yugo scored below every other small car we tested in recent years.” Remarkably, sales held up for a while; 75,000 cars were purchased as late as August 1987. But the good times didn’t last, and in 1988 sales tanked. The New York brokerage firm of Mabon, Nugent & Company nudged Bricklin aside when it acquired Global Motors, the firm he had created to import Yugos. Bricklin made several million dollars on the deal, but his lavish lifestyle and a mountain of debts led to another bankruptcy in 1991. For Global Motors the success of the transaction hinged on an agreement to import Proton automobiles from Malaysia, but when the deal was nullified, Global’s parent firm was in big trouble. Mabon, Nugent & Company incurred substantial losses and...

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