Yahoo Finance A Quick History of the Yugo, the Worst Car in History
In May 1984, entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin was in a bind. His venture, the importation of Pininfarina Spiders and Bertone X1/9s, was failing, and, facing bankruptcy, he had 120 days to find a more profitable car to sell here. So Bricklin scoured the world, traveling first to England, where he tried to land Jaguar, then to Serbia, a republic of what was then communist Yugoslavia. It was there, in the parking lot of Belgrade’s Hotel InterContinental, that he and former Fiat executive Tony Ciminera first examined a Fiat-based hatchback called the Yugo.
“I’m looking at [the car] and I said, ‘Ugh! This is really primitive!’ ” recalls Ciminera. But Bricklin was desperate. So the next day, he and Ciminera toured the Yugo factory, whose owner, the aptly named Crvena Zastava (or Red Flag) Works, also made machine guns. The building was dark, the floors greasy, and Ciminera was shocked to discover smoking workers stepping into cars with dirty shoes on and newly stamped fenders being thrown into bins. It was a disaster. But because the Yugo cost about $2000 wholesale, Bricklin figured he could cover the car’s homologation and sell it stateside for just $3990, which he did in August 1985.
Although it was a communist-made car sold in Reagan’s America, dealers had customers lining up 10 deep to buy one. Yugo America sold an astonishing 1050 cars in a single day. But what goes up must come down. There were serious quality issues. The car was slow, crawling to 60 mph in 14 seconds and topping out at 86 mph. Then came the reviews. C/D’s then technical director, Csaba Csere, wrote, “It’s obvious to me that the Yugo GV is inferior to every other car sold in America.”
The hits kept coming. The car performed poorly in crash tests, sales plummeted, and soon everyone was ripping on it: Saturday Night Live, Leno, Letterman, The Simpsons. Kids told jokes about it, and one dealer in Philadelphia offered a “Toyugo” sale, but most buyers refused the free Yugo that came with the purchase of their Toyota. The end came in 1992, when, during the Yugoslav civil war, Yugo America went bankrupt (for a second time), and the United Nations issued a trade embargo on Serbia that included Yugo parts.
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