- You get good cars, you got bad cars.
Then you got the worst car ever.
One vehicle that has landed itself
on the bottom of the beater pile time and time again.
It's the ultra cheap Eastern European hatchback
that became the butt of every bad late-night joke
and still remains a punchline to this day.
- Let's jump the bridge.
- But we're in a Yugo.
(car engine revving)
(car crashing)
- What country is this car from?
- It no longer exists. Put it in age.
- Today, we're gonna talk about the infamous Yugo.
Like a lot of awful things, it came to us in the 80s.
But despite its bad rap, the Yugo was not a total failure.
It defied logic, surpassed expectations
and even broke some sales records.
So let's find out why the world's worst car
was actually a huge success.
(logo whooshing)
The Yugo was a no-frills potato of a car
that many describe as a glorified lawnmower.
It had cheap price with even cheaper construction.
So how did this communist era car become such a big hit
in Reagan's capitalist America?
To find out we're gonna have to go back
to the start of it all, Genesis.
(upbeat rock music)
♪ I can feel it ♪
The Yugo's name comes from the former country of Yugoslavia,
which is now Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia
and a few other smaller countries.
The Yugo was born in the town of Kragujevac,
Kragu, Kragujevac, Krah-goo-yeah-vats.
Sorry if I mispronounced that
from the loins of a firm called Zastava,
a company that manufactured cannons, guns
and military vehicles.
After World War II, Zastava continued to build Jeeps
but was looking to get in the production car market.
They were able to work out a deal with Fiat
and bought licenses to produce Fiat models in Kragujevac
under the Zastava name.
In the late 1970s, they designed their own version
of the Fiat 127 called the Yugo.
And by 1980, it officially went into production.
In terms of design, the powertrain and chassis of the Yugo
was identical to the decade-old Fiat 127.
The body and interior though, were different
and they were not an upgrade.
Arguably more important
that the Yugo's geographical birthplace
is the political environment in which it was born into.
The post-Stalin Soviet Bloc was a communist union
and automobiles were an ideologically complex aspect
of communist life.
Having a car played into the same individualism
that the leaders in power fought against
but they were also an important sector
of technological advancement
that the Soviet Bloc so desperately needed
to catch up to the capitalist first world.
As kind of a compromise,
the cars that came out of this area and era
were made to be totally utilitarian.
Like everything made in the Soviet Union,
they were made to be functional, not flashy.
And they're made at a bare minimum cost.
The Zestava factory worked differently
from factories in the States.
The luxury and options available in American cars
were seen as frivolous and unnecessary.
During a tour of the...
(electronic scratching)
It's hard to say the Za-sta-va, just saying that.
During a tour of the Zastava factory,
Yugo America's product planner, Tony Seminara,
recalled a quote, "The place was humongous.
But it was also filthy. I mean the floor
was two inches thick with grease from the press shop."
It was like no one's kitchen.
He also said that he saw workers quote,
"Manhandling raw sheet metal
and putting damaged parts onto finished cars."
The idea of craftsmanship
wasn't at the heart of the factory.
It was cheap labor made by people
that probably didn't have cars of their own.
This is how many cars were built in the Soviet Union.
The Yugo made perfect sense for the place and the time.
So why and how did the Yugo come to America?
The Yugo's arrival to the American automotive market
was the result of a perfect storm of circumstances.
So let's set the scene, okay?
It's the early 1980s
and capitalism is in full force in Reagan's America.
You had Michael Douglas was on Wall Street
saying greed was good.
Everybody had big shoulder pads for some reason,
gold-plated DeLoreans were available to purchase
in the back of "SkyMall".
Things were good, sort of.
The free market is in fashion, all right?
Fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye.
After suffering two gas shortages,
Americans purchased foreign cars in record numbers
because these things were better, okay.
They were better on gas and just had better build quality.
Most of these cars were small economy cars from Japan.
So in order to avoid an import cap,
Japan enacted a "voluntary export constraint,"
which meant they'd be sending way fewer cars to the States.
To get the most buck for their bang,
they shifted export focus to higher-end
mid-sized luxury sedans,
and that's where brands like Acura, Lexus
and Infiniti came into the picture.
This left a huge gaping Yugo-shaped hole
in the American small car markets. Simultaneously,
an American oil company called Occidental Petroleum
had just signed a counter trade deal with Yugoslavia.
The deal basically said that the United States
would give Yugoslavia oil in exchange for pretty much,
whatever they could make that they thought would sell well
in the U.S. It was a real loosey goosey
international trade deal and it laid the perfect groundwork
for a new fun Yugoslavian import to step into the scene.
Like when an exchange student comes to your school
and he's like really handsome. He partys.
Along came man with a mission, Mr. Malcolm Bricklin.
He was a businessman with an unconventional career
and a reputation for bringing companies back
from the brink of extinction.
He founded Subaru of America after the failure
of the Subaru 360 micro car. A K-car
that looked like a Citroen had a baby with a Beetle.
Then one fateful day in 1984,
Malcolm was walking a London street
when he spotted a Yugo 45. The idea struck him
like an entrepreneurial bolt of lightning.
He would bring this little communist car that couldn't
to the United States and sell it to the car-hungry masses
at an egregiously low price.
So in 1985, after a series of setbacks
that were quite frankly inevitable, the Yugo finally made it
to U.S. shores. Would the American consumer buy the Yugo?
Would it be a success?
Or would it flop like the Subaru 360 before it?
Well, let's just say that when Yugo hit the market,
people went into a mania.
Yugo Mania.
On August 25th 1985, the Yugo debuted
in 50 Northeastern dealerships for the jaw dropping price
of $3,990.
Which is about $9,600 today.
That was about half the price of any other cheap new car
around that time. Many dealers promoted it
with a financing deal of $99 down and $99 a month.
That's like cheaper than the Nissan version Note today
and much, much didier. And consumers, they did consume
in a frenzy like a bunch of piranas chewing up
a cranberry that fell into the Marsh.
People lined up at the dealerships in stupid numbers.
The Boston Washington Corridor completely sold out.
Americans bought 1050 Yugos in one day.
People waited months for their Yugos to be delivered.
It was truly Yugo mania.
It was an actual cultural phenomenon
like Beaver fever or Nolan madness and that comes next year.
For the next six months, the media was saturated
with headlines and commercials for the Yugo.
It was a perfect first car for new drivers.
The perfect second car for families.
A magnet for bargain hunters.
Heck if I was around in 1985, I might have bought one too
but I wasn't. I'm obviously very, very young.
The Yugo sold like hotcakes
and became the fastest selling European import ever
in the United States but then people started driving them.
(woman screaming)
And it didn't take long for Americans to realize
why the Yugo was cheap. Quite frankly, it sucked.
It was slow, unreliable and unsafe.
The Yugo quickly gained the reputation
as the worst car ever.
And it became the butt of many dad jokes
of which I will deliver.
What do you call a Yugo with a flat tire? Totaled.
How do you double the value of a Yugo? Fill up the gas tank.
What comes free with every Yugo? A bus schedule.
I would go on but all those jokes have aged
just as well as the Yugo itself.
Anyway, the Yugo couldn't recover
from its horrible reputation.
And Yugo of America folded in 1992.
RIP
So let's take a closer look
at what exactly makes the Yugo so terrible.
The thing that made the Yugo so enticing was that it was one
of the cheapest cars you could buy but you know
what they say, "You get what you pay for."
And that rang especially true for the Yugo.
It was very cheaply made. From the outside,
it actually doesn't look too bad.
It was similar in design to other hatchbacks
of the 80s like the Golf or the Fiesta.
But if you're ever lucky enough to get inside one
of these things, you're gonna see a ton of flimsy plastic,
exposed bolts, fasteners and wires
and very cheap upholstery.
The base model only has two air vents,
no glove box and a radio that comes without pre-sets.
That's right. The Yugo forces you to manually channel surf
while you're driving.
The steering wheel controls look like pieces
of plastic cutlery.
The door locks are made of loosely placed,
pac-man shaped pieces. And you don't even get cup holders.
There's no arm rest. There's no frills.
And that's just the interior. Under the hood,
the Yugo boasts a 1.1 liter four cylinder engine.
The spare tire sits right next to the engine.
And the spare tire itself is a bit larger than the engine.
It has something like 40 horsepower.
The car creeps from zero to 60 in 14 seconds.
The suspension on the Yugo was almost non-existent.
It was difficult to steer and it couldn't get up most hills.
In 1986 J.D. Power and Associates rated it dead last
in consumer satisfaction.
And when crash tested by the Institute for Highway Safety,
the Yugo crumpled like a jackoline in December.
It was all around crappy but for all its crappiness,
for all its flaws,
I still consider the Yugo a considerable success.
And here's why. Quite frankly by the numbers,
this car was a success. Don't get me wrong.
The Yugo definitely earns its spot
in the Hoopty Hall of Fame.
But considering how small the dealership network was,
its first year sales were astounding and record breaking.
During its eight year run in the American market
almost 140,000 units sold.
And it did all that despite being a communist car sold
in Reagan's America.
It's buzz overcame anti-Soviet sentiment
and capitalized on a whole country's obsession
with consumerism. Sales aside, the quick rise
and even faster fall of the Yugo
was a historical cultural phenomenon.
It was such an automotive anomaly that it inspired art
and spawned a cult following. Kevin O'Callahan,
artist and teacher at the New York School of Visual Arts
was inspired when he saw some kids
on the street playing baseball
and using a broken down Yugo as a backstop.
Its transformation from treasure
to trash sparked the idea for the famous art exhibit.
Yugo Next. He and his students collected Yugos
and transformed them into an array of non-car items.
He turned them into foosball tables, cigarette lighters,
slot machines and telephones. The whole idea
of the exhibit was to make something useful
out of something use less.
Now I'm no expert but that's a pretty good art.
And it came from this bad, bad part.
Yugo Next is just one of the many ways the Yugo has sunk in
into our collective consciousness.
For such a failure, it's pretty famous.
I mean, we're still talking about it today.
There's a Bosnian band with a song about it.
A Viennese rapper who uses it as his whole brand.
There are countless YouTube videos
that spew their affectionate odds to the Yugo.
They're loyal subscribers. It's a cult classic,
cool story and a symbol of country that no longer exists.
So yeah, the Yugo was a success.
The same way that The Room was a success
or Tubthumping by Chumba Wamba or crocs.
People love to hate the Yugo.
It's so bad that it's good and at any rate,
we're still talking about it. Right?
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