(Hill & Wang), is the jokes that were made about it:
Q: What’s the difference between a Yugo and a golfball?
A: You can drive a golf ball 200 yards.
Q: What do you call a Yugo with twin tailpipes?
A: A wheelbarrow.
And there were plenty more where those came from.But the enjoyment doesn’t end with the jokes. The entire book is anentertainingoccasionally extremely funnyyet entirely serious examination of agalloping business disaster, the people who created it and the economic andcultural era that fostered it.
Was the Yugo actually the worst car ever sold in America?Despite his title, the author, an assistant professor of history at Bridgewater Collegein Virginia,gives that dubious honor to the Subaru 360. Also in the running are thethree-wheeled BMW Isetta and a similar vehicle from Messerschmitt.
People compare the Yugo to the Ford Edsel, anotherautomotive mistake, but at least the Edsel worked. The Yugo was simply a cheap,atrocious piece of automotive junk that managed, after persistent doctoring ofthe substandard original product, to meet the minimum U.S. safety andemissions regulations to be allowed on the roads. Once there, it typically fellapart.
The man behind its importation, Malcolm Bricklin, ishimself, in Vuic’s portrayal, a piece of work. An archetypal fast-talking,optimism-exuding salesman, he leapt to ever newer projects as those behind himcrumbled into failure. I lost count, but I believe the book chronicles fourbusiness bankruptcies he went through.
His crowning debacle was the Yugo. When Bricklinintroduced it to the United States in 1985, it was already 20 years outof date. Built at a huge, and hugely inefficient, plant in Kragujevac, Yugoslavia,it was based on the Fiat 127 and Fiat 128, Spartan subcompacts from the 1970s.
Nevertheless, it became the fastest-sellingfirst-year European import in U.S.history. Because Bricklin had been slick at generating free advance publicityin newspapers and magazines, “Yugomania” was in the air: When it first went onsale, at $3,999, customers stood in line at dealerships. Some bought it sightunseen. Chrysler once offered to buy the company.
Just as quickly, buyers’ complaints of breakdownsand deficiencies began flooding in. ConsumerReports gave it a devastating review; it even took the rare step ofcriticizing the importer for his questionable track record. The car didextremely poorly on federal crash tests. Croatian-Americans angry at Yugoslaviapicketed dealerships and urged a boycott.
Sales plummeted, and Bricklin’s company, Yugo America, had noad campaign to counter the bad news. It tried desperately to correct defectsand/or ramp up production of new models at the Yugoslav plant, but it proved tobe a brick wall to deal with a noncompetitive mentality in which production wasslow and changes were slight. Yugoslavia’sgrowing economic mess only added to the difficulties.
Yugo Americawent bankrupt in January 1989. Bricklin attempted to get out of his mess by importing a compact car madein Malaysia.That went nowhere, and he filed for his (then) latest bankruptcy in June1991which turned out to be only a speed bump on his way to further overlyoptimistic (and also failed) schemes. The last Yugo rolled off the assemblyline in Serbiaon Nov. 11, 2008.
Vuic’s research and documentation are solid;especially revealing are his interviews with people who worked with or forBricklin. He puts the Yugo enterprise in the context of Yugoslav history,automotive history and international politics, the latter being particularlyimportant since this was the time Yugoslavia started to break apart.
Between 1985 and 1992, approximately 150,000 Yugoswere sold in the United States, though probably relatively fewAmericans have ridden in one or perhaps even seen one. The author estimatesthere may be as few as 1,000 working Yugos remainingif “working Yugo” isn’t anoxymoron.
