How bad an idea was it buying a car made in a communist country? Two guys from Donut Media pick up a used Yugo to see if it lives down to its reputation.
“Journalists have been crapping on it for decades, but is it really that bad?” Spoiler: Yes.
Their Yugo has 20,593 miles on it, and the build quality is obviously crap. “The needle for the speedometer is broken off, which is annoying, and it has a very optimistic high number of 110 miles per hour.”
One reason the car has such poor quality is the cost: The Yugo was $4,000 brand new back in the mid-1980s.
“This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a company called Corvina Zastava, which literally means red flag. You think the people that bought these would have seen the huge red flag.”
“In reality the Yugo is a clone of the Fiat 127. Corvina Zastava licensed the design from Fiat and built their version in the motherland.”
“One thing that communist Yugoslavia didn’t have access to that Fiat did was purpose-built machinery. And that’s how you get panel gaps.”
“Zastava literally spared every expense they possibly could when making this thing, from the metal stamping to the interior.”
You really have to watch the entire video to enjoy the diverse panoply of mystery noises and bumps they experience.
“Americans ended up hating the Yugo, but here’s the thing: It was never meant for the U.S market. It was a complete fluke that had ever made it to our shores in the first place.”
It was strictly meant as a utilitarian vehicle for Yugoslavians.
“As Edmunds said when they reviewed an 89 Yugo, ‘the Yugo is slow, low grip and high effort.’ Sure, it’s got a rack and pinion, but the Yugo doesn’t even have power steering. You have to throw your entire body weight into most of your turns.”
“This is not good. Dude, having a car change direction depending on what the throttle is doing? I’m gonna give that a fail.”
The transmission is awful, the shifter is floppy and the throttle is sticky.
It idles at 3,000 RPM. (A Honda Accord idles around 750.)
Car entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin (who formed Subaru of America to import those cars) was looking to import low-cost cars in America. Not in the video is this weird passage in Bricklin’s Wikipedia entry: “Bricklin, senior advisor Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Under-Secretary of State and Yugo board member Lawrence Eagleburger, and Global Motors executives met with Zastava. Bricklin agreed to import the Zastava Koral, marketing it as the Yugo.” Because who knows about cars better than Secretaries of State?
“The kids were calling it Yugomania, and people were legitimately psyched about the Yugo.” Having been alive at that time, I can assure you that never happened. The only marketing I remember from the time was a radio spot that focused on the cheapness and the “new car smell” and had an insipid little jingle: “Me and my Yugo/Wherever we go.”
“140,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S.”
The reason it got imported over here was that Yugoslavia had broken away from the Soviet Union and enjoyed pretty good relations with Reagan’s America, and Fiat had pulled out of the American market, meaning Zastava had no contractual bar to exporting the Fiat clone into the U.S.
“The manufacturer claimed it could go 0-60 and 14.3 seconds, which is horrible for even then but some reviewers clocked in at more like 18 seconds.” How long did it take the Donut guys to hit 60? 35.3 seconds. At full throttle.
“Carbureted engines can be very reliable, but probably not ones built in a communist country on the brink of collapse.”
Their Yugo broke down 10 minutes into filming a mile down the freeway.
“Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight. Consistency also wasn’t their top priority, either. That’s all to say that the high tolerances they had while manufacturing these cars led to some very unreliable parts.”
At the time Yugos were being sold, Honda Civics started at $5,800. And the stock Civic engine makes more power than two Yugo engines!
“Yugo did not make a good car.”
Sales peaked at 48,812 in the U.S. in 1987, but had declined to 3,092 in 1991, when the Yugoslavian Civil War got underway, then less than half that in 1992, when UN sanctions came down, and that was the end of the Yugo in America. Supposedly later Yugos were somewhat more reliable.
The lesson here: Never buy a car made in a communist country, unless you’re building a Museum of Failure.
As a bonus, enjoy this hilariously dishonest Yugo TV ad.
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25 Responses to “Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes.”
Right after the Wall fell I had a chance to drive an East German Trabant.
It was like an oversize go kart. Had a three on the tree, which I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Cramped. Dashboard felt like it was made out of cardboard.
One of the first things the West German government did upon taking over, was slap a couple inches of asphalt on top of all the main roads. This made them passable. The Trabi rode fairly well on the main road. When I pulled off onto the secondary road, which was full of bumps, waves,, potholes cracks, and so forth, it became instantly apparent that the suspension system is made out of worn out bungee cords. Or worse. I never did get under there to see what it was, but that’s what it felt like. We were bouncing all over the road and my East German host, who owned the car, was laughing his ass off at me while I was cursing and bouncing all over the road and trying to avoid all the trees that the Germans love to plant right next to the roadway.
When we miraculously reached our destination intact, I had him open the hood. There was this little lawnmower engine sitting in there with an air cleaner on top that look like a coffee can. I was mentally ID’ing all the parts of the engine, when I saw this large canister with a huge screw lid mounted on top, between the air cleaner and the firewall, sort of on top and behind the engine. I traced the tube, running from it, and suddenly I somewhat excitedly asked my host:
“Ist das Benzin!?”
My host laughed uproariously, and said
“Ja! Hit tree, BOOM! HAH HAH HAH!”
as I thought of all those trees along the secondary road that I’d just narrowly missed.
My host said when his daughter was born a couple years prior to this, he ordered a Trabant for her, so it might be ready for her when she was old enough to drive. The waiting list was 15 years.
It was built by Germans, and yet it was a piece of shit machine. If the Germans couldn’t make communism work, nobody can.
I actually drove a Yugo. Once. On I-5, in the rain.
The phrase “death trap” comes to mind… It wasn’t totally terrible, but it was assuredly zero-frills. It was damn near “zero car”, in terms of being the absolute minimalist version of the concept “car”.
The near-by passage of a semi was enough to induce a heart attack, because it was so light that you’d experience being sucked under the trailer as the truck passed you.
I returned the car to the guy I borrowed it from with an incredulous “You let your wife drive that thing on the highway? What are you, nuts? I hope you have a good insurance policy on her…”
Also, as a bit of a defense… Crna Zastava builds really good rifles and pistols, being the former state arsenal of Yugoslavia. The vehicle thing? Not so much…
If you ever get the chance to get your hands on a Zastava commercial Mauser from the old days, jump on it; they’re usually really good rifles. Accurate as hell, and very well-made.
A lot of the stuff in that video about the country and factory is just plain… Wrong. Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw Pact, Tito having split with Stalin shortly after WWII. It’s all incredibly complex, but the upshot is that while Yugoslavia was more-or-less Communist, it also had ties to the West that were surprising. We provided them with weapons after WWII, and a good deal of aid afterwards. I suspect that if WWIII had ever happened, they’d have been at least strongly neutral. Their entire defense policy was focused on invasion by the Soviets and Warsaw Pact, which they intended to resist with bloody-minded ferocity. They may have been Communist with a capital-“C”, but they were absolutely not “Soviet”. Stalin tried sending assassins after Tito, several times. After the last one, Tito messaged Stalin that if there was one more, then he’d be sending one of his own to Moscow, and that there’d be no need for a second…
“Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight.”
Even if the Yugo had been built in a nominally free-market economy, it’s managerial structure would have doomed it.
Socialist self-management or self-governing socialism was a form of workers’ self-management used as a social and economic model formulated by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was instituted by law in 1950 and lasted in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1990, just prior to its breakup in 1992.—Wikipedia
On a personal note, a shooting buddy of mine bought one of these cars. It appealed to him because of his Serbian ethnicity. I rode as a passenger when we went to the range . It was not too much worse than the Chevy Chevette I owned at the time. They were both death traps.
I suppose we each had some sick need to feel like our lives were being threatened which would then justify our outrageous expenditures on high-end firearms.
I actually owned a Yugo, at a very money deprived time for my family. Thanks to the hand-down largess of a relative. I had to turn the headlights on to get the radio to work, and there was a lever in the engine block to turn on the heat when it got cold. The dashboard controls didn’t work, so it was heat all winter, then turn off to swelter in the summer. A cousin who knows cars said if I could drive the Yugo, I could drive an 18-wheeler, because the gear shift was so horrible. Getting it into reverse was always near impossible.
It got me where I needed to go for the few years until I could save enough to get a better car.
A buddy of mine had one back in the 90’s, build quality was laughable (he actually had a bumper sticker that said “if a part falls off please blow your horn.) But mechanically he never had a problem with it, although he only used it to drive back and forth to work, a distance of probably 8 miles. He had a real car for other trips and errands.
On t’other hand, the Yugoslavians made some fairly decent wines. My brother-in-law worked for a distributor back in the late 1980’s (89?) that sold “Avia” cabernet sauvignon. As a cab it was pretty poor, but it you looked at it as a cheap red table wine it was quite reasonable at (if I remember correctly) about $1.50 a bottle, and a discount off that for case price.
I went through a few cases of the stuff, and still have a liver, so it couldn’t have been too bad. The brand is still around, apparently.
[…] THE QUESTIONS NO ONE HAS ASKED SINCE AROUND 1991: Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes. “This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a […]
Back in the late 80s, living in New Orleans, a friend and I were out looking at garage sales. Halfway down a residential block, Tony yelled “hammer it, John. Bad neighborhood!” I was up to about 60, pulling thr pistol out from under the seat, when I realized that I hadn’t heard gunshots. I asked Tony what he had seen, and he answered: ‘They were stripping a Yugo.”
I was a factory service rep for BMW back in the 80’s. One of the dealers I called on had actually become a Yugo dealer, and they still had a couple of “new” ones that were almost a year old that were unsold. The interiors were completely falling apart. Dashboards cracked and peeling. Upholstery coming apart at the seams. Total junk. I believe it was Jay Leno who joked that you could double the value of your Yugo by filling the tank.
For more Yugo related fun, look up “I Drive a Yugo” by Norfolk, Va bar band Left Wing Fascists. Original studio version even includes a hat tip to, wait for it, Donald Trump!
“I believe it was Jay Leno who joked that you could double the value of your Yugo by filling the tank.”
I recollect Jay had quite a few Yugo and other car jokes lined up back in the day. Once during his monologue, he quipped that he’d seen something he’d never seen before: A Yugo that wasn’t hanging off the end of a tow truck. Another time it was, “Say, you know you’re having a bad day when you’re stuck in traffic with a Ford Pinto in front and an Audi 5000 in the rear”.
My favorite Yugo story was on the Click and Clack radio show on NPR. Someone called in and asked about buying one of two Yugos, and listed the options – one car had a rear window defroster. They advised buying the one with the rear window defroster as that would keep your hands warm when you pushed the car!
Friend had one, bought new. It was only slightly worse than the cars the rest of us were driving, but our cars were junkers from the 1960s early 70s. About equivalent with the 1962 Ford Falcon I drove in high school in 1979.
I remember when the Yugo first showed up in the US Consumer Reports mentioned it in one of their car review issues that they hadn’t included it because it didn’t meet their minimum standards to be considered a car.
More recently, Adventures with Purpose found one in a river. Diver brought up the badge, which caused considerable bafflement as none of them had ever seen it before. It took a video call to a mechanic friend to ID it.
[…] in Mexico, and Texas AG Ken Paxton should go after Biden, not fellow Republicans BattleSwarm: Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes, BREAKING: Paxton Acquitted, and More Tech Companies Cancelling San Francisco Conferences Behind […]
I had one, gawd awful baby poop green, drove it to a party & on the way home caught a green light & whipped it around the corner & rolled it completely over, engine never stopped & we kept on going. Made it home & turned it into a tow car to pull trailer boats around the repair yard. lasted a few years after that. Stereo cost more than it did.
Right after the Wall fell I had a chance to drive an East German Trabant.
It was like an oversize go kart. Had a three on the tree, which I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Cramped. Dashboard felt like it was made out of cardboard.
One of the first things the West German government did upon taking over, was slap a couple inches of asphalt on top of all the main roads. This made them passable. The Trabi rode fairly well on the main road. When I pulled off onto the secondary road, which was full of bumps, waves,, potholes cracks, and so forth, it became instantly apparent that the suspension system is made out of worn out bungee cords. Or worse. I never did get under there to see what it was, but that’s what it felt like. We were bouncing all over the road and my East German host, who owned the car, was laughing his ass off at me while I was cursing and bouncing all over the road and trying to avoid all the trees that the Germans love to plant right next to the roadway.
When we miraculously reached our destination intact, I had him open the hood. There was this little lawnmower engine sitting in there with an air cleaner on top that look like a coffee can. I was mentally ID’ing all the parts of the engine, when I saw this large canister with a huge screw lid mounted on top, between the air cleaner and the firewall, sort of on top and behind the engine. I traced the tube, running from it, and suddenly I somewhat excitedly asked my host:
“Ist das Benzin!?”
My host laughed uproariously, and said
“Ja! Hit tree, BOOM! HAH HAH HAH!”
as I thought of all those trees along the secondary road that I’d just narrowly missed.
My host said when his daughter was born a couple years prior to this, he ordered a Trabant for her, so it might be ready for her when she was old enough to drive. The waiting list was 15 years.
It was built by Germans, and yet it was a piece of shit machine. If the Germans couldn’t make communism work, nobody can.
I actually drove a Yugo. Once. On I-5, in the rain.
The phrase “death trap” comes to mind… It wasn’t totally terrible, but it was assuredly zero-frills. It was damn near “zero car”, in terms of being the absolute minimalist version of the concept “car”.
The near-by passage of a semi was enough to induce a heart attack, because it was so light that you’d experience being sucked under the trailer as the truck passed you.
I returned the car to the guy I borrowed it from with an incredulous “You let your wife drive that thing on the highway? What are you, nuts? I hope you have a good insurance policy on her…”
Also, as a bit of a defense… Crna Zastava builds really good rifles and pistols, being the former state arsenal of Yugoslavia. The vehicle thing? Not so much…
If you ever get the chance to get your hands on a Zastava commercial Mauser from the old days, jump on it; they’re usually really good rifles. Accurate as hell, and very well-made.
A lot of the stuff in that video about the country and factory is just plain… Wrong. Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw Pact, Tito having split with Stalin shortly after WWII. It’s all incredibly complex, but the upshot is that while Yugoslavia was more-or-less Communist, it also had ties to the West that were surprising. We provided them with weapons after WWII, and a good deal of aid afterwards. I suspect that if WWIII had ever happened, they’d have been at least strongly neutral. Their entire defense policy was focused on invasion by the Soviets and Warsaw Pact, which they intended to resist with bloody-minded ferocity. They may have been Communist with a capital-“C”, but they were absolutely not “Soviet”. Stalin tried sending assassins after Tito, several times. After the last one, Tito messaged Stalin that if there was one more, then he’d be sending one of his own to Moscow, and that there’d be no need for a second…
While watching, I got an ad in the middle of another ad. A new low for YouTube
Coming up next: the Yugo EV.
“Factories in communist countries had terrible working conditions and very little oversight.”
Even if the Yugo had been built in a nominally free-market economy, it’s managerial structure would have doomed it.
Socialist self-management or self-governing socialism was a form of workers’ self-management used as a social and economic model formulated by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was instituted by law in 1950 and lasted in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1990, just prior to its breakup in 1992.—Wikipedia
On a personal note, a shooting buddy of mine bought one of these cars. It appealed to him because of his Serbian ethnicity. I rode as a passenger when we went to the range . It was not too much worse than the Chevy Chevette I owned at the time. They were both death traps.
I suppose we each had some sick need to feel like our lives were being threatened which would then justify our outrageous expenditures on high-end firearms.
This was a popular joke in Minnesnowta:
“Why did all Yugo’s include an electric rear window defroster?”
“To keep your hands warm while you were pushing it.”
I actually owned a Yugo, at a very money deprived time for my family. Thanks to the hand-down largess of a relative. I had to turn the headlights on to get the radio to work, and there was a lever in the engine block to turn on the heat when it got cold. The dashboard controls didn’t work, so it was heat all winter, then turn off to swelter in the summer. A cousin who knows cars said if I could drive the Yugo, I could drive an 18-wheeler, because the gear shift was so horrible. Getting it into reverse was always near impossible.
It got me where I needed to go for the few years until I could save enough to get a better car.
A buddy of mine had one back in the 90’s, build quality was laughable (he actually had a bumper sticker that said “if a part falls off please blow your horn.) But mechanically he never had a problem with it, although he only used it to drive back and forth to work, a distance of probably 8 miles. He had a real car for other trips and errands.
On t’other hand, the Yugoslavians made some fairly decent wines. My brother-in-law worked for a distributor back in the late 1980’s (89?) that sold “Avia” cabernet sauvignon. As a cab it was pretty poor, but it you looked at it as a cheap red table wine it was quite reasonable at (if I remember correctly) about $1.50 a bottle, and a discount off that for case price.
I went through a few cases of the stuff, and still have a liver, so it couldn’t have been too bad. The brand is still around, apparently.
[…] THE QUESTIONS NO ONE HAS ASKED SINCE AROUND 1991: Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes. “This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a […]
Back in the late 80s, living in New Orleans, a friend and I were out looking at garage sales. Halfway down a residential block, Tony yelled “hammer it, John. Bad neighborhood!” I was up to about 60, pulling thr pistol out from under the seat, when I realized that I hadn’t heard gunshots. I asked Tony what he had seen, and he answered: ‘They were stripping a Yugo.”
Suprised this didn’t come up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz2eCFoafXk
(Sorry for the potato quality: best I could find)
There is no Serbian or Yugoslav word ‘corvina’. I think you mean Crvena – that does mean red (feminine form). Trust me on this 😉😉
I was a factory service rep for BMW back in the 80’s. One of the dealers I called on had actually become a Yugo dealer, and they still had a couple of “new” ones that were almost a year old that were unsold. The interiors were completely falling apart. Dashboards cracked and peeling. Upholstery coming apart at the seams. Total junk. I believe it was Jay Leno who joked that you could double the value of your Yugo by filling the tank.
I had a Yugo. It was definitely not slow. It had a real Fiat engine in it.
Otherwise, it was crap.
For more Yugo related fun, look up “I Drive a Yugo” by Norfolk, Va bar band Left Wing Fascists. Original studio version even includes a hat tip to, wait for it, Donald Trump!
I think they had one in the Dragnet ’87 movie, Dan Aykroyd called in something like “the cutting edge of Serbo-Croatian automotive technology.”
“Never buy a car made in a communist country.”
Especially if you’re not even *living* a communist country…!
“I believe it was Jay Leno who joked that you could double the value of your Yugo by filling the tank.”
I recollect Jay had quite a few Yugo and other car jokes lined up back in the day. Once during his monologue, he quipped that he’d seen something he’d never seen before: A Yugo that wasn’t hanging off the end of a tow truck. Another time it was, “Say, you know you’re having a bad day when you’re stuck in traffic with a Ford Pinto in front and an Audi 5000 in the rear”.
My favorite Yugo story was on the Click and Clack radio show on NPR. Someone called in and asked about buying one of two Yugos, and listed the options – one car had a rear window defroster. They advised buying the one with the rear window defroster as that would keep your hands warm when you pushed the car!
Friend had one, bought new. It was only slightly worse than the cars the rest of us were driving, but our cars were junkers from the 1960s early 70s. About equivalent with the 1962 Ford Falcon I drove in high school in 1979.
I remember when the Yugo first showed up in the US Consumer Reports mentioned it in one of their car review issues that they hadn’t included it because it didn’t meet their minimum standards to be considered a car.
More recently, Adventures with Purpose found one in a river. Diver brought up the badge, which caused considerable bafflement as none of them had ever seen it before. It took a video call to a mechanic friend to ID it.
[…] in Mexico, and Texas AG Ken Paxton should go after Biden, not fellow Republicans BattleSwarm: Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes, BREAKING: Paxton Acquitted, and More Tech Companies Cancelling San Francisco Conferences Behind […]
I had one, gawd awful baby poop green, drove it to a party & on the way home caught a green light & whipped it around the corner & rolled it completely over, engine never stopped & we kept on going. Made it home & turned it into a tow car to pull trailer boats around the repair yard. lasted a few years after that. Stereo cost more than it did.