Paul shanklin in a yugo

History Identification And Significance

THE YUGO

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THE YUGO The Rise and Fall

of the Worst Car in History

JASON VUIC

Hill and Wang A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York

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Hill and Wang A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2010 by Jason Vuic All rights reserved Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc. Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Lyrics to “Jugo 45” by Zabranjeno Pusenje, reprinted by permission of Dario Vitez, and lyrics to “The Bricklin” by Charlie Russell, reprinted by permission of Charlie Russell.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vuic, Jason, 1972–

The Yugo : the rise and fall of the worst car in history / Jason Vuic.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8090-9891-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Zastava automobile—History. 2. Automobiles, Foreign—United States. 3. Automobiles— Yugoslavia—History. I. Title.

TL215.Z32V58 2009 629.222'2—dc22

2009025612

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

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http://www.fsgbooks.com
For Nancy and the Gerb

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Contents

Introduction 1. Yugo Girls! 2. The Habitual Entrepreneur 3. A Canadian Sports Car? 4. Walkin’ Down a London Street 5. The Serbian Detroit 6. Bricklin’s Next Big Thing 7. The “Four-Meter Fax” 8. Destination America 9. Yugo-mania 10. “It’s Going to Be a Bloodbath” 11. The Ambassador Drives a Yugo 12. The Car-Buying Bible 13. The Proton Saga Saga 14. Thirty-five Hundredths of a Percent 15. Mabon In, Bricklin Out 16. “The Yugo Is a No-Go” 17. “ZMW, Get It?” Epilogue

Notes Acknowledgments Index

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THE YUGO

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Introduction

Q: What do you call the passengers in a Yugo? A: Shock absorbers.

The artist Kevin O’Callaghan builds really big things—really big, really poppy, really visual things, like a giant pair of glasses for the singer Elton John or TV and movie sets for A&E, ABC, and the kids’ network Nickelodeon. O’Callaghan is a master of “3-D illustration,” and teaches a course on the subject at the prestigious School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.1 Each year he sponsors several student shows. For one, titled “The Next Best . . . Ding!,” O’Callaghan gave each student a vintage typewriter and asked the class “to reinterpret” the machine in a different way. “I’ve always been interested in useless items and giving them other uses,” said O’Callaghan, whose students turned fifty decrepit typewriters into beautiful works of art.2 They were functional too. There was a gumball machine, a meat slicer, a Kleenex dispenser, an aquarium, a blender, a shoe-shine kit, a snow globe, a pay phone, even a Corona-matic-cum-waffle iron that made keyboard-shaped waffles. O’Callaghan’s other student shows have included chairs, beds, clocks, carousels, chessboards, and versions of the famed “Moon Man” from MTV.3

But O’Callaghan’s most popular show, bar none, was on the Yugo, the failed car from Yugoslavia. “I was driving around one day and saw some kids playing stickball,” he said, “and they were using a Yugo as the backstop.” O’Callaghan stopped and asked them about it. “‘Does your father know you’re doing this?’ [And the kids] said ‘Yeah, it’s a piece of junk.’” 4 As O’Callaghan drove away, he had an idea: his next show, scheduled for the main foyer of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, would involve the Yugo. “The Yugo was like the little engine that couldn’t,” said O’Callaghan. “It was the worst-designed product of all time. [So, in holding a show,] we wanted to give the Yugo a new life other than the one [it was designed for].”5 But for that, O’Callaghan needed Yugos, dozens and dozens of Yugos. He placed an ad in several New York newspapers under the caption “Yugos Wanted Dead or Alive.” He received seventy-nine calls in three days, and bought thirty-nine relatively un-dented Yugos for $92 apiece.6

Then his students went to work. They transformed the automobiles into truly eye-popping displays that one magazine called “witty, playful, [and] brilliant . . .

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impeccably crafted and technically amazing.”7 Like the Yugo Easter Island head, the Yugo Zippo, and the Yugo baby grand. There was also a Yugo accordion, a Yugo subway car, photobooth, toaster, telephone, diner, shower, movie the ater, and a cozy Yugo fireplace complete with a deer head. There was a Yugo barbecue, a Yugo confessional, and a Yugo port-a-potty with the license plate GOT2GO. The crowds loved it. In May 1995, literally thousands of people took in the exhibit, which then traveled to more than twenty cities, including Montreal. It was featured on NPR, CNN, NBC, CBS, and in newspaper and TV reports from as far away as Croatia. The National Enquirer even covered it. “We’ve gotten a better reception than we ever expected,” said Celia Landegger, the creator of the Yugo baby grand. “We’re all just blown away. Every day we’re amazed [at] how many people have heard of it.”8

“Squeezing Lemons to Make Art,” read a Washington Post headline. “Sad Little Cars Given New Life as Sculpture,” said The Dallas Morning News. In all, several dozen newspapers and magazines reviewed the exhibit, giving it high praise for its creativity, sense of humor, and optimism. The reviews also agreed that the Yugo, the tiny, unassuming $3,990 import, was a “hopelessly degenerate hunk of trash.”9 For just a sampling: “The Yugo is to cars what Milli Vanilli is to rock n’ roll” (Chicago Tribune); it was “the auto industry’s greatest fumble” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); the “scourge of interstates every where” (Daily News [ Los Angeles]) ; “the Rodney Dangerfield of cars” (People).10 As The Buffalo News put it: “Nobody has sympathy for the Yugo. Only bad dreams. Junkyards won’t take them. Dogs never chased them. No Yugo was reported stolen, because no owner wanted it back. [And when Kevin] O’Callaghan picked up one for his [art exhibit], he got it for nothing plus a spaghetti dinner.”11

But was the Yugo that bad? Can any car, even a bad car, be a “hopelessly degenerate hunk of trash”? Why was the Yugo so reviled? Even today, a simple Google search of the terms “Yugo” and “worst car” receives more than twenty thousand hits. In 2000, listeners of the popular National Public Radio program Car Talk voted the Yugo “the Worst Car of the Millennium.”12 According to Yahoo! Answers it is “the worst car ever sold in the U.S.”13 Ditto at rateitall.com, bestandworst.com, and automotoportal.com.14 In 2008, readers of the AAA magazine Via ranked the Yugo the worst car ever and a 2007 Hagerty Insurance poll declared the Yugo the second ugliest car in history.15 It was second in Richard Porter’s book Crap Cars and was named by Time.com and Forbes.com as one of the worst cars of all time.16 The Yugo appears in Eric Peters’s book Automotive Atrocities, in Craig Cheetham’s book The World’s Worst Cars, and in Giles Chapman’s book The Worst Cars Ever Sold.17 The Yugo even has an entry in the online Urban Dictionary—collector of such useful terms as dope, snap, and dawg

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http://rateitall.com
http://bestandworst.com
http://automotoportal.com
http://Time.com
http://Forbes.com
—that reads simply: “the world’s worst car.”18 Comedians use the Yugo for their jokes. “President [George H. W.] Bush again

denied that the U.S. is in a recession,” quipped Jay Leno. “I don’t know if people believed him. After his speech [he] returned to the airport in [a] presidential limo [named] Yugo One.”19 Singers sing songs about it. There’s “My Bloody Yugo” by the Legendary Jim Ruiz Group (a slick bossa nova ditty), there’s “I Drive a Yugo” by the Left Wing Fascists (a kind of alt-punk number), there’s “I’ll Stay Yugo” by the Belgian electronica group OwlMusik, and then there’s Paul Shanklin’s satirical ballad “In a Yugo.”20 Writers parody the car in books such as Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey; in television shows such as Moonlighting, The Simpsons, and Saturday Night Live; and in movies such as Dragnet, Bowfinger, Drowning Mona, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Die Hard III. Advertisers spoof the Yugo in commercials for Yahoo! and Midas, kids destroy the Yugo in games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now, and university professors study the car’s importer, Yugo America Inc., in order to show students how not to run a business.21

In short, the Yugo is an icon. “People made fun of the Edsel,” wrote one author, “Ford’s $400 million mistake . . . [but] at least the Edsel worked . . . The dreadful Yugo, on the other hand, was both hard to view on a full stomach and an out-and-out vile little car that stretched the most generous usage of [the terms] ‘shoddy’ and ‘slapped together.’ The car was less reliable than . . . a Halliburton financial disclosure . . . [and] will likely hold in perpetual ignominy the title of ‘Worst Car Ever Sold to the American Public.’”22 Strong words, but what do we know about the Yugo? Who imported it? Who made it? And why? One would think that such an iconic automobile would have a story behind it, a tale, but what most Americans know are the jokes: How do you make a Yugo go faster? Use a tow truck. How do you double the value of your Yugo? Fill the gas tank. What’s included in every Yugo owner’s manual? A bus schedule.

But what Americans don’t know, for instance, is that it was the fastest-selling first-year European import in U.S. history. Or that when the Yugo went on sale in America, there were lines at some dealerships ten deep. Or that Yugo dealers once sold 1,050 cars in a single day. Or that Chrysler once offered to buy the company, or that its CEO, Malcolm Bricklin, was the first person to bring Subaru to the United States. What Americans do know is that the Yugo was bad, really bad, but relatively few people have ever seen one. The company sold, at most, 150,000 cars between 1985 and 1992. Since then, their numbers have dwindled to perhaps 1,000 working Yugos. (And that’s generous: as of 1999 there were more than seventeen million registered vehicles in Florida, but just one registered Yugo.)23

So was the Yugo that bad? Yes . . . by almost any measure. It was cheap, poorly built, somewhat unsafe in a crash, prone to breakdowns, and dirty emissions-wise,

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and for such a small automobile its gas mileage was poor. In 1986, Consumer Reports wrote that it was better to buy a good used car than a new Yugo. That same year the Yugo ranked thirty-three out of thirty-three in a J.D. Power and Associates consumer satisfaction survey, and in a series of 5-mile-per-hour crash tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), it sustained a whopping $2,197 in damage, more than twenty-three other cars. In 1987 it topped both the Massachusetts and New York state Lemon Indexes, and in 1988, in the midst of a Motor Trend magazine road test, the Yugo GVX broke down. The Yugo was also last in a North Carolina emissions test and last in a Car Book survey of resale values, and in a report published by the IIHS the Yugo had the eighth highest death rate of any 1984–88 model-year automobile on the highway between 1985 and 1989. So, yes, the Yugo was bad.

But was it the worst car in history? No. Any ranking is subjective, but as a rule if an automobile passes U.S. safety and emissions tests it is a relatively decent car. Not necessarily a good car or a reliable car, but one that has met certain basic, presale standards that are among the toughest in the world. Said one Peugeot executive, whose company left America in 1991, “There were considerable changes [we had to comply with]. Emissions systems, injection equipment, [and] on-board diagnostics are all different on U.S. vehicles . . . and [they] must be reinforced for crash requirements and fuel-system integrity . . . It [simply] has to be done.”24 One Mercedes manager estimated “that the company sold 15 percent of its cars in the U.S., [but] had 50 percent of [its] engineers working on U.S. emissions problems.”25 The standards were that tight. Thus, there’s a reason why Russian Ladas and Samaras aren’t sold here, or why Indian Tatas or Malaysian Protons or Chinese Dongfengs haven’t captured the American market (though, in the case of Chinese cars, this may indeed happen).

For my vote, the worst car ever sold in America was the Subaru 360, a car so light it was exempt from federal safety regulations and was considered a covered motorcycle (see Chapter Two). It had forward-opening “suicide doors,” burned a quart of outboard motor oil every 260 miles, and had front and rear bumpers that were several inches lower than those of any car on the road. Consumer Reports rated it “not acceptable.” Then there was the super-mini BMW Isetta, which in the 1950s was banned from California’s freeway system for being too small and too slow, and the three-wheeled Messerschmitt (yes, of German Luftwaffe fame), which sat two passengers in tandem, had a handlebar instead of a steering wheel, had no reverse gear, and started with a pull chord. (You may have seen it in the film The Addams Family, where it was driven, fittingly enough, by Cousin Itt.) So no, the Yugo wasn’t the worst car in history, not by a long shot.

What the Yugo was was a dated automobile, even in 1985. The car was based on the Fiat 127 and the Fiat 128, both utilitarian subcompacts conceived in the

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1960s. Thus, the Yugo was incredibly spartan: the original GV model came only with a stick shift. It had no radio, no air-conditioning, no air bags, and no tachometer; its windows were hand cranked, of course, and it lacked even a glove compartment. “To understand [the Yugo], you’ve got to look at it strictly in terms of fundamental transportation,” wrote Car and Driver. “[It is a] cheap, no-frills appliance.”26 The Yugo was cheap. At $3,990, it was the least expensive new car in America. (With dealer financing, a new Yugo cost just $99 a month). It was pitched as a generic people’s car; a new Volkswagen; in the words of the man principally behind its introduction to America, Malcolm Bricklin, “a nineteen-cent hamburger with meat.”27 In the fall of 1985, people flocked to buy it. Hundreds bought Yugos sight unseen. Though a dull little car built in communist Yugoslavia, the Yugo was a hit—no, a mania, something the Associated Press called a “Yugomania.” It didn’t last. Critics panned the car for its poor quality. Sales dipped, Bricklin sold the company, and Yugo America went bankrupt in 1992.

That should have been it, but by then the Yugo was firmly ensconced as the worst car in history, a car that Americans love to hate. It’s true. We hate the Yugo. The Brits hate it too. (In 1996, British TV journalist Jeremy Clarkson called the Yugo “a hateful, hateful car,” and destroyed one sorry example with a shell from a Chieftain tank.)28 The question is: Why? Why are bad cars pop icons, and why is the Yugo the greatest bad-car pop icon of all time? The answer is in this book. The Yugo story is in this book. It is the sad, sometimes funny, and altogether fascinating tale of how entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin brought the Yugo to the United States. It is a short history of the worst car in history.

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1

Yugo Girls!

Q: How do you double the value of your Yugo? A: Fill the gas tank.

The original idea to sell the Yugo in America came from California entrepreneur Miroslav Kefurt, who in March 1984 imported three Yugo 45s for display at the Los Angeles AutoExpo. Slight of build yet long in personality, Kefurt was a character. He had come to Los Angeles in 1969 from Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he and his father sold used cars. The Kefurts specialized in one model, the Fiat 600, which they sold in one color: red. “It wasn’t that Czech car buyers were demanding red Fiat 600s,” remembers Kefurt, “it was because private car dealing was illegal.”1 Technically, Czech citizens could sell their cars only after their odometers had reached 5,000 kilometers. But buying and selling used cars in quantity, as a business, was against the law. Thus, there were no used car lots in communist Czechoslovakia. Buyers simply found their cars through word of mouth or ordered new cars directly from Czechoslovakia’s two main auto producers, Skoda and Tatra.

However, like all Soviet bloc countries, Czechoslovakia had government waiting lists for new cars. To buy a Tatra 613, for instance, car buyers paid full price in advance, then waited six months to a year for delivery. The buyer had no say over the car’s color or interior, and received no warranty of any kind.2 “That was one of the flaws of a communist country,” states Kefurt. “Somebody in the government would make a decision of how much of anything could be exported, imported, manufactured, or sold . . . It was the same thing with cars. The government didn’t make enough new cars, so a black market developed for used ones . . . But since it was illegal for people to deal in used cars as a business, my father had to be careful. That’s why he bought the same make and model [the Fiat 600] over and over, then drove the cars for five thousand kilometers before selling them at a profit. Nobody could tell these were all different cars. It was good business.”3

Kefurt’s father was a tour guide by profession, which meant he could acquire new Fiat 600s during business trips to northern Italy. He would buy a car, drive it back to Czechoslovakia, then bribe a guard at the border. “Bribes always worked in those days,” remembers Kefurt. “You could bribe anyone for anything.”4 His

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father bought three or four Fiats per year, and each family member had a Fiat registered to them. The goal was to put 5,000 kilometers on each car, a daunting task for the Kefurts, considering the poor roads and lack of interstates in Czechoslovakia. In 1967, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that Czechoslovakia had 46,000 kilometers of roads, of which only 10,000 kilometers were paved. By contrast, the United States had over 3 million kilometers of roads, of which 1 million were paved.5 That was when Kefurt’s father had an idea. He and his son would race their Fiats in local road rallies to burn the 5,000 kilometers.

Kefurt began racing at age fourteen; at sixteen, he placed in one of Czechoslovakia’s main road rallies and was well on his way to becoming a professional driver. But in 1969 Kefurt decided to leave Czechoslovakia to live with an uncle in the United States. Through various family connections he secured an exit visa and began working at his uncle’s restaurant in West Hollywood, California. Kefurt arrived in the United States in 1969, the same year as Woodstock, the launching of Apollo 10, and the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam. As a student at Hollywood High he found most of his friends owned muscle cars: Pontiac Firebirds and Plymouth Barracudas. They were a far cry from Kefurt’s Fiat 600.

One day while walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, Kefurt passed a Honda motorcycle dealership, which had just displayed the company’s first-ever imported automobile in its showroom window, a tiny two-door sedan known as the 600. By almost any measure, the Honda 600 was a midget. At a length of 125 inches, the 600 was nearly three feet shorter than the Volkswagen Beetle. At 1,355 pounds, it also weighed 500 pounds less than the Beetle. In addition, the Honda 600 had a four-speed manual transmission, a unibody steel construction, and reached a top speed of 80 miles per hour. The price: $1,275. Kefurt was in love. “Compared to the Fiat 600,” he states, “the Honda 600 was a rocket.”6

Like many small-car enthusiasts, Kefurt favored the 600’s handling to that of larger and more powerful muscle cars. He eventually bought other 600s and opened a business fixing the cars for Hollywood-area owners. Though Honda stopped selling the 600 in 1972, in the early 1980s Kefurt discovered that people were willing to spend thousands of dollars to restore their tiny 600s. The car had a real following, so much so that Kefurt developed a profitable Honda 600 business and was known locally as a small-car guru. He drove and tested not only Hondas but also any other small car he could find. In 1982 Kefurt read that socialist Yugoslavia was producing a new two-door hatchback based on the Fiat 127 and with a 903cc, 45-horsepower engine.

Known as the Yugo 45, the car was cheap (by American standards) and, in Kefurt’s words, “an import opportunity just waiting to happen.”7 The Yugoslavs

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planned to export the car to Great Britain in mid-1983 but had no such plans for the United States.8 Therefore, in the summer of 1982 Kefurt hopped into his Honda 600 and drove to the Yugoslav consulate in San Francisco. At the time, socialist Yugoslavia had consulates in California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, as well as a sprawling embassy complex in Washington, D.C.9 In San Francisco, Kefurt met with an official commercial attaché who assisted him in contacting the Yugoslav auto manufacturer Crvena Zastava, the maker of the Yugo 45. Located ninety minutes south of Belgrade in Kragujevac, Serbia, Crvena Zastava had been established in 1953 in a failing armaments plant in the city center.

The name Crvena Zastava means Red Flag in Serbo-Croatian, as in the red flag of communism. In later years the Yugo 45 would send up a different red flag among Western consumers. According to economic historian Michael Palairet, the car “was badly built, like all Zastava’s cars, and bottlenecks of every kind limited output.”10 Although in 1962 Zastava teamed with Italian car manufacturer Fiat to build a new $30 million factory on the outskirts of Kragujevac, by the 1980s its facilities were outdated.11 According to one observer, “By US, Japanese and Western European standards, the Zastava works are a throwback to the Dark Ages —a Diego Rivera mural choreographed live. Noisy, smoky, and in many places poorly lit, the facilities teem with workers . . . OSHA [the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration] would have a field day here.”12 Zastava also lacked many of the production standards then common in the West, which was the direct result of being the only true car manufacturer in a protected market.

Kefurt had never been to Kragujevac. He also had no experience with Zastava’s low-quality motorcars. But he knew that the Yugo 45 was essentially a Fiat, a car sold in the United States in one form or another since 1957. Even though Fiat had announced that because of poor sales it was leaving the American market, Kefurt believed that he could “keep” Fiat in the United States by importing the Yugo.13For that, however, he needed a license, so with the help of the Yugoslav commercial attaché in San Francisco, in 1982 Kefurt sent a telex to Yugoslavia’s state-run export company Genex. Short for General Export, Genex was socialist Yugoslavia’s main trading house, whose job it was to sell consumer goods and other commodities for over 1,200 domestic firms. In 1982, Genex did $4 billion in business. The company had offices in some seventy countries and in 1986 introduced McDonald’s to Yugoslavia.14

Genex put Kefurt in touch with Zastava, but officials there were skeptical that consumers in the United States would buy Yugos. Remembers Kefurt, “They told me that Americans wanted V-8s, that Americans wanted air-conditioning and automatics and that Zastava just didn’t make them.”15 Nevertheless, Kefurt was determined. He pestered Zastava until late 1983, when the company awarded him

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Yugo 45 distribution rights for the state of California. There were no contracts, no negotiations, and no paperwork. In fact, Kefurt’s Yugo license, if it could be called a license, was a one-page telex. It stated that beginning with the 1985 model year, Zastava would provide Kefurt with five thousand cars annually. The telex said nothing of price. What is more, Zastava offered no guarantees and demanded that Kefurt pay for each car up front.

License in hand, in November 1983 Kefurt ordered three Yugo 45s from Kragujevac. They cost a grand total of $7,200 and were shipped to Los Angeles in a forty-foot container that arrived in March 1984. Kefurt was beside himself. He’d spent less than ten grand and was now owner, president, and CEO of YugoCars, Inc., the official distributor of Yugo 45 automobiles from Yugoslavia.16 Kefurt knew it was a long shot, that most Americans wanted V-8s, and air-conditioning, and automatic transmissions. But timing was on his side. Just two months earlier Yugoslavia had hosted the XIV Winter Olympiad in Sarajevo and ABC had given the Games over sixty-three hours of television coverage.17 There were Sarajevo placemats at McDonald’s, Sarajevo postage stamps from the U.S. Postal Service, even a thermos and bowl set from Campbell’s, the “official soups” of the 1984 Winter Olympics.

Night after night, reporters praised Yugoslavia for its efficiency. The Yugoslavs have done “every thing capitalists say socialists can’t do,” exclaimed one.18 Buses “run frequently and on time . . . Messages are delivered quickly . . . [and arriving American journalists are] whisked to their village, assigned porters, and shown to [their] rooms . . . Skeptics said [Yugoslavia] couldn’t handle a modern Games. Well, wherever Marshall Tito is these days . . . he must be smiling. What the Yugoslavs have pulled off is a tribute to the virtues of nonaligned socialism.”19 The Sarajevo Games closed on February 19, 1984, and were described by Juan Antonio Samaranch, the International Olympic Committee president, as “the best organized Winter Games in the history of the Olympic Movement.”20

Next up: Los Angeles. As Kefurt waited for his first shipment of Yugos to arrive in California, Los Angeles readied itself for the 1984 Summer Games. The Games’ chief organizer, Peter Ueberroth, actually “wondered aloud whether Los Angeles would be able to muster the [same sort of] enthusiasm that Sarajevo had” in supporting its Olympics, then praised Yugoslavia for being one of only three communist countries then planning to attend.21 (The others were China and Romania.) Since early May, a group of fourteen communist countries led by the Soviet Union had been boycotting the Games because, as the Soviets claimed, the U.S. government had failed “to guarantee the safety of Soviet athletes” in Los Angeles or “squelch the activities of private anti-Soviet groups in California.”22

The Soviets alleged that CIA operatives were planning to give psychotropic drugs to Russian athletes in order to “trick” them into defecting, and had “infiltrated

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members of terrorist and extremist [groups]” into Ueberroth’s organizing committee.23 Ueberroth was livid. If the Soviet Union and its allies failed to make it to Los Angeles, over half of the world’s “world champions” would be absent.24 It’ll be a “second-rate competition,” said one official, “really no competition at all. [It’ll be like a] Pan Am Games with Asians and Africans . . . I mean, what kind of Olympics [is] that?”25 To ABC, the Games would be a bore, a profit-killing, audience-shrinking bore, which is why, in its contract with Ueberroth, it had stipulated that if the Soviet Union chose to boycott the Olympics, Ueberroth’s organizing committee would refund the network upwards of $90 million in fees.26

Although Ueberroth and ABC settled on a much lower figure, as of May 1984, Los Angeles needed a boost, something to remind viewers that America’s first summer Olympics in over fifty years wouldn’t just be competitive, it’d be watchable—in industry terms, “good TV.” As it stood, ABC planned over 180 hours of coverage through two full weeks, nearly thirteen hours a day. For months, it had been charging companies as much as $260,000 for a thirty-second spot and had already sold over $428 million in airtime.27 “If ratings turn out to be less than expected,” wrote The Wall Street Journal, “advertisers may ask ABC for compensation in the form of credits,” maybe even refunds.28 Thus, when China, Romania, and Yugoslavia defied the Soviet boycott and sent teams to the Olympics, they were quickly dubbed Los Angeles’s “great Red hopes.”29

The Yugoslavs called the boycott deplorable and, in mid-May 1984, announced they were sending their largest Olympic team ever: 223 athletes competing in 19 different sports. As one Yugoslav coach put it, “We didn’t discuss the boycott at all. [And] why should we? We are an independent country, and we do what we feel is right. We will not be told what to do by the Soviet Union, or anybody else.”30Yugoslavia had been independent of Moscow since 1948 when its leader, Josip Broz Tito, announced he was pulling the country out of the Soviet bloc. In the coming decades, Yugoslavia maintained good (if not close) relations with both superpowers, but refused to ally itself with either. By 1984 its foreign trade was almost equally distributed between East and West.31 Yugoslavs drank Coke, wore blue jeans, did business with American firms such as Dow Chemical and Westinghouse, and traded their farm produce for Soviet oil. They “liked to play both sides equally,” said one former diplomat. “They could really straddle the fence.”32

Yugoslavia was neutral politically, and since it had already competed in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which the Americans had boycotted, it saw no reason to boycott the 1984 Games. “Sports are meant to be liberated from all political influence,” said Ahmed Karabegovic, a Yugoslav Olympic official from Bosnia. And besides, “where the Olympics are concerned, the most important element is

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business.”33 The Yugoslavs had learned that lesson in Sarajevo, where they’d made, by some estimates, at least $20 million.34 They wouldn’t make anything in L.A. They were only participants. But the Yugoslavs hoped that their anti-boycott stance, so praised in the press, would be a good form of “company” PR. And in fact it was. At the Games’ opening ceremonies, the Yugoslav team entered the Los Angeles Coliseum to thunderous applause, second only to the Americans’.35

Yugoslav officials no doubt hoped that Americans’ goodwill toward Yugoslavia would mean that they’d buy, for instance, Yugoslav wines (such as Avia, which Coke distributed) and Yugoslav tools, furniture, and textiles. Who knows? Maybe even cars. At least that’s what Kefurt hoped. But then his Yugos arrived. They were red, white, and blue. They had yellow French headlights, tartan interiors, and retread tires. They were three of the worst cars Kefurt had ever seen. “I almost cried,” he says. “Before then I had only seen pictures and the pictures were nice but now we can’t start things. The doors don’t lock. The windows don’t go up and down. Then I find paperwork in one of the cars saying that these three were factory rejects. They were supposed to go to France, but there were so many problems with them, the French sent them back!”36 Kefurt and his mechanic spent the next three weeks making the cars presentable. To the red Yugo, Kefurt added a sunroof, mag alloy wheels, and a “super-duper” stereo system, which he claims cost more than the car. He also took the red Yugo to Olson Laboratories in nearby Fullerton, Cal i fornia, where it underwent a series of emissions tests required by the state’s Air Resources Board (CARB).

The CARB set strict emissions standards for all new automobiles sold in California, which the Yugo promptly failed. The car performed poorly on its tests because it continued to use an antiquated carburetor. Thus, to sell Yugos in the United States, Kefurt faced a choice: he could equip the car with a cleaner carburetor, or he could replace the Yugo’s carburetion system with electronic fuel injection.37 Either way, he needed help from Zastava. “The carburetion was bad,” remembers Kefurt. “So it was my decision to have a fuel-injected car. The fuel injection designed by Bosch in those days was fantastic, but Zastava wasn’t interested. I realized then that these guys didn’t want a successful car.”38

Undeterred, Kefurt made plans for the Los Angeles AutoExpo. He printed up Yugo 45 brochures, signs, and promotional literature, then recruited his wife and four teenage models to wear tight Yugo 45 T-shirts and miniskirts and attend the Expo as his “Yugo Girls.” The Expo took place in June 1984 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Kefurt’s display included his red, white, and blue Yugos, a plain, unadorned table, and folding chairs for his Yugo Girls. For some reason the Expo’s organizers had given Kefurt a premium display space next to the main entrance and directly opposite Mercedes-Benz. As a result, thousands of people visited Kefurt’s Yugo exhibit, where his five Yugo Girls were a hit. By show’s end,

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they had distributed four hundred Yugo T-shirts and twenty thousand Yugo brochures, and had taken forty-two $100 deposits on back-ordered automobiles. To demonstrate the Yugo’s toughness, Kefurt spoke to potential buyers while standing on the car’s roof. When at one point he dented the roof, he jumped down, reached inside, and popped out the dent out with a loud Thwop! “Go try that at Mercedes- Benz,” he said, “and see what they tell ya! Go stand on a Mercedes!”39

Eventually Kefurt’s Yugo exhibit drew the attention of Paul Dean, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “When the Big Three and the European Eleven and the Oriental Six go to car shows,” wrote Dean, “it’s a million-dollar bazaar of revolving neon and Simonized gloss beneath sequins . . . Then there’s the Yugo 45 and Miroslav Kefurt. His booth is five folding chairs around a rented table and no potted chrysanthemums because they cost extra. The models, female, are Kefurt’s secretary and her Sun Valley friends uniformed in company T-shirts and red miniskirts. And the models, vehicular, are sedans made in Yugoslavia from a decade-old body design around an engine that’s been in production for 27 years.”40