Souped up yugo

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

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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