40 Years Ago, We Met the Yugo and It Was Rough. What’s with the Redux?

In the past 20 years, unless you count obituaries of pals gone behind pit wall, I’ve written rarely about cars. If it weren’t for Yugo’s anniversary and recent hints that the brand may actually make a comeback, I wouldn’t be doing so now.

But I’m a believer in learning from mistakes. The 141,651 U.S. car buyers who bought Yugos learned that a car priced at $3990, even in 1985, was a de facto hoax. They also learned that a pre-owned Yugo had the trade-in value of a dying cocker spaniel. The Yugo itself, however, stands on the cusp of oozing its way into that bag of twisted totems we call cults—proving that poor quality, poor durability, and poor driving dynamics are no barriers to automotive immortality.

Cult of Personality

Basic automotive history teaches that infamy does not end or begin with the Tucker, Corvair, and Edsel. This threesome, in my estimation, has fewer charms than an eggplant, yet each has become a cult car. The Yugo can match each of these cars’ maladies and then some, and if we’d been paying attention in 1985 when the Yugo went on sale in the U.S., we’d have realized that was inevitable.

Here’s a sampler of cult qualifications we overlooked: The Yugo was built in Yugoslavia. By communists. It had no cupholders. You could secure an appointment to see your doctor before reaching 60 mph in your Yugo. Fit and Finish could have been a comedy team; once you saw the finish, you had a fit. Under the hood, the spare tire cozied up to a 1.1-liter engine. There are whiskey bottles larger than that. (The Jack Daniel’s Black Label 3.0-liter Big Bottle, to name just one.) Don’t ask me how I know. There are lots more, but we’ll start with the essential requirement: a charismatic leader.

The Yugo did not have Oz, but it had a wizard: Malcolm Bricklin, who never hid behind a curtain in his life and was a player on the automotive stage by the time he was 30. In Rolling Stone, writer Basem Wasef described him as, “brash, bombastic, and pathologically prone to betting the farm on pie-in-the-sky automotive ventures.”

In 1968, the afroed, bellbottomed and mustached young Philadelphian began his climb up the automotive beanstalk by going to Japan and talking Subaru into making him the U.S. importer of its Model 360. The tiny car weighed 950 pounds, light enough to avoid costly U.S. regulations. The 360 had a radio, whitewall tires, and got 66 miles to a gallon of unleaded.

Bricklin brought 10,000 examples of the 360 to America, all of them white with red leather interiors. The advertising tagline was “Cheap and Ugly does it.” Though priced at only $1297, sales were dampened by Consumer Reports rating it “not acceptable.” A 360 required 37.5 seconds, or “most of the afternoon,” to reach 50 mph. But Bricklin nonetheless constructed a dealer network aided by more acceptable Subaru models. Inept as it was, the 360 has a following, and a fine example today can bring many times its original cost.

In 1971, after selling most of his profitable Subaru of America distribution apparatus, Bricklin set out to build his dream: a fiberglass sports car that would challenge the Chevrolet Corvette but which would emphasize safety. With financing from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, he built the Bricklin SV-1 at a factory in Saint John. The SV stood for “safety vehicle,” and it had gullwing doors plus an integral roll bar. It did not have an ashtray because Bricklin believed smoking to be unsafe while driving.

The SV-1 project (1974-1975) produced almost 2900 of the unevenly finished creations before self-destructing. No lives were lost, just millions of Canadian dollars and the Prime Minister of New Brunswick’s job.

Bricklin next imported two cars that began life as Fiats, renaming them for their designers and marketing them to U.S. dealers as a pair. These were the Pininfarina 124 Sport Spider and the Bertone X1/9. This venture blew up around 1983 when Cadillac pressured Sergio Pininfarina—by then building the complete 124—to stop, lest Cadillac’s upcoming Allanté (1986) find itself sharing the Pininfarina badge with an ex-Fiat old enough to buy beer in most states.

Bricklin Lays the Groundwork

Dealers did not want the Bertone X1/9, still built by Fiat, as a solo act. This setback left master huckster Bricklin without imported merchandise to sell, so he sent agents looking for “the cheapest car in the world.” Tony Ciminera, a former publishing executive now part of the Bricklin organization, found the unholy grail in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a country that had appeared on the map in the wake of the Great War (1914-1918).

Diplomat savants at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference cobbled a country from the fractious collection of ethnic and religious diversity known collectively as the Balkans. Fast-forwarding through subsequent and frequent political upheavals and name changes, Hitler’s Nazis occupied the (by then) Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941. This unilateral intrusion generated a partisan rebellion that bloodied enough Nazi noses to draw reprisals. The death of a single Nazi soldier brought the swift murders of one hundred Yugoslavs. From among the guerrilla blocs, communist Josip “Tito” Broz rose to supremacy, and by war’s end became dictator. His new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia joined neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, and he spent the years between 1945 and his death in 1980 keeping Russians out of the Yugoslav henhouse and using a milder, homegrown form of totalitarianism to distribute the eggs.

How is this history germane to the Yugo saga? Tito allowed Zastava, an arms manufacturer since the mid-1850s, to acquire obsolescent automotive tooling from Fiat and build cars at its Kragujevac factory south of Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital. The cars were based on Fiat’s expired 127 and 128 models. Zastava introduced the subcompact Jugo 45 in 1980 and, under multiple names and permutations, the Fiat-based Jugo/Yugo sold 794,428 units worldwide before it disappeared in 2008. By communist bloc standards, the Yugo was a heroic triumph; certainly, compared to the contemporaneous East German Trabant, it was an engineering breakthrough. The U.S. invasion proved to be more problematic, but the Yugo was not a failure on its home turf.

Soon after Bricklin’s search for a cheap car began, the Zastava Jugo raised its radio antenna. By hand, of course. Malcolm Bricklin’s search party heard about it.

“I didn’t really know where Yugoslavia was,” Bricklin told an interviewer. Awaiting his first flight to Belgrade, he encountered former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the men’s room at the Zurich airport’s VIP lounge. As the pair stood side by side at urinals, Bricklin introduced himself and said he was trying to import cars to the U.S. from Yugoslavia. With his free hand, the former Secretary of State handed Bricklin a business card.

Bricklin had met, entirely by happenstance, the head of a super-connected geopolitical consulting firm. He became a client. Which doubtless removed any speed bumps impeding his importation of the Zastava Yugo to the US. He renamed it the Yugo GV, for “Good Value,” (nudge nudge).

The Yugo that Tony Ciminera had found for Malcolm Bricklin could be purchased for $1900 and exported to America. Bricklin and Ciminera—who took on the task of product planner—quickly saw that selling the car in the U.S. would require a few alterations: 535 of them Bricklin estimated, speaking years later. The modifications were dealer-driven, marketplace-driven, and lest we forget, regulation-driven. At Zastava, the U.S. Yugo got its own building, and the cost of modifying the car resulted in job creation for Zastava and Yugoslavia. It was not a cash bonanza, but the arrangement was acceptable to all parties.

By the summer of 1985, Malcolm Bricklin dressed more like a New York banker than a 1970s Hollywood divorcee. The mustache, afro, and bellbottoms were gone, replaced by short graying hair and well-tailored grownup clothes. The spellbinding entrepreneur chose Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green in Central Park as the Yugo GV’s launching pad. Amid a revivalist atmosphere replete with balloons, cowboy hats, and models, Bricklin claimed a network of 400 dealers and 100,000 pre-ordered Yugo automobiles.
Most of all, he bragged about the price: $3990. ($11,850 in 2025 dollars.)

The Price Was Right

A price that low guaranteed more noise than a bobcat in heat. It also guaranteed that Chevrolet’s Chevette, stickered at $5499, was no longer the country’s cheapest car. Had P. T. Barnum been at Tavern on the Green, he would have signed up for a Yugo dealership. Clearly, Bricklin was back in the car business. Keith Crain, owner and publisher of industry rag Automotive News, described Bricklin as being, “…like one of those toy clowns that when you punch it, it bounces right back up.”

Indeed, not counting the ahead-of-its-time EV Warrior electric bicycles, video jukeboxes, and Italian scooters, Bricklin, who recently turned 86, had made his biggest bounce with the Yugo. Along the way, he had careened from profit to loss and back again. Now he had landed in Central Park like a town crier shouting, “Thirty-nine-ninety and all’s well!” (In an interview years later, Bricklin said of his Yugo business: “I was making a couple million dollars a month and sold out for $20 million. And that is considered my big failure?”)

Marshall Schuon, writing in the New York Times, called the 1986 Yugo, “the vehicular equivalent of the five-cent cigar.” Looking back, many think of it as a turd in the motoring punchbowl, but then, a smiling Malcolm Bricklin was introducing the least expensive car in America to the largest automobile market in the world, also America. With a large and growing dealer network in place and a massive number of orders in hand, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot. But adversity doesn’t scare wizards. Successful cult leaders demonstrate a reluctance to slink whimpering from the field at the first sign of trouble. That’s called leadership. It takes more than Kool-Aid and intergalactic conspiracies to attract lemmings in quantities large enough to keep a cult’s dues affordable.

The Yugo wizard and his corporate acolytes knew they’d hit one into deep center field with the $3990 price. The press, both automotive and general, let the nation know that a tiny car with a tiny engine, tiny fuel cost, and a tiny price tag was on its way here from Yugoslavia. It went on sale August 25, 1985, but by December 31, only 3895 Yugos had putt-putted off dealer lots. This shortfall was due to normal sorting-out difficulties compounded by a shortage of cars in the Yugo supply chain. Problems of that nature continued in 1986, when the company sold 35,959 cars but managed to pry only 40,000 out of Yugoslavia. Compared with the aforementioned bobcat-in-heat hype, the Yugo 30-Day Supply number was panda-libido-low.

A Visit to Zastava

By the fall of 1986, with the supposed 100,000 pre-orders still unfilled and scant good news in the automotive magazines, Yugo management announced it would observe a traditional rite of passage for imported car companies: the overseas press trip. Automotive writers from the U.S. would fly to Belgrade. From Yugoslavia’s capital city, they would bus to the Zastava factory in Kragujevac. There, they could watch joyful communist craftsmen on their home field bolt together shiny new U.S.-spec Yugo GV subcompacts.

As it happened, I became a participant in Yugo’s first trans-Atlantic press trip. The peripatetic Tony Ciminera assembled a group of automotive writers in attendance at the Salon de l’Automobile in Paris, an every-other-October event that the escargot enthusiasts and Francophiles among us eagerly awaited. What could be more fitting for a group of sophisticated boulevardiers than a trip to Yugoslavia?

After two days of collecting press kits at the Salon, we commenced our Yugo experience. About a dozen of us boarded a Boeing 737 at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle on the outskirts of Paris and deplaned less than three hours later at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade. The ambience was Iron Curtain Lite. The moderate crowd in the aging but clean airport sounded subdued compared to the throngs in O’Hare or LaGuardia. The customs officers appeared content to just look us over, but their stares could melt concrete. Not threatening, you understand, just not the sort you want appearing unannounced on your front porch at midnight.

Claiming baggage took time, but all bags made it through. We located our bus—easier in 1986 than now—and made our way to the hotel. There we dressed for cocktails at the U.S. Embassy, where we met with John Scanlan, the then-new U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia. We spent an hour acquainting ourselves with the Yugoslav economy and familiarizing ourselves with rakija, a fruit brandy best served cold. Or to some other guest. I tried sljivovica, a plum brandy. As I remember it, this liquid exhibited overtones of creosote supported by a full finish reminiscent of cleansing agent. We called it “Tito’s Judgment Suppressor.”

After dinner at our hotel, we retired early to rest up for tomorrow’s trip to Kragujevac and the Zastava factory. Two hours later, I awoke with the overwhelming conviction that I’d been poisoned at the embassy. But no, I had contracted one of those 24-hour viral disorders that makes you want to call room service and order a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and a loaded revolver.

Thanks to a confused bus driver, who took the lengthy route to Kragujevac, my mysterious malady had diminished sufficiently to allow my participation in the factory tour. Unlike the airport, the warehouse-like Yugo factory looked tired and dusty. Large colorful banners hung from the lofty ceiling, adding a strange festive air to the perfunctory car construction going on at floor level. There were representations of Marshal Tito, six years dead but still a presence. Other hangings portrayed idealized workers slimmer and happier than the thickset gang lumbering around an assembly line that had more fits and starts than a tuberculosis ward.

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It was easy to postulate that the Zastava facility typified a communist factory of 1986. And equally easy to criticize a quality-control department whose instruments of choice were hefty wooden mallets big enough to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The production-line consumption of plum brandy, which our guide said caused the long lines at the hellish restrooms, was troubling, but we saw no more missing fingers than you might find at a meatpacking plant.

We did a short drive on our third and final day in Yugoslavia, aware that we were piloting descendants of ancient Fiats that smelled like brand-new turnips. The best thing about the driving experience was its brief duration. In conversation, we agreed for the most part that the only explanation for the Yugo’s U.S. success—still on an upswing in late ’86—had to be the lure of its low price. Looking back, its ultimate failure can be attributed to the reluctance, or inability, to maintain an old-design car. One Yugo television commercial bragged that the car had “no expensive microchips to replace.” Word of mouth piled on, and the media hammered the car’s overall quality with the regularity and intensity of sunrise.

Automotive writers of the Yugo’s time (1985-1992), including this one, failed to see the Yugo as anything other than a car you could savage mercilessly in print without offending the big spenders and heavyweights populating the U.S. auto industry.

The Zeal is Real

It did not help polish the Yugo’s legacy, but it may have enhanced its status for ironic culthood, when, on September 22, 1989, high winds lofted a Yugo off Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge. It fell 152 feet into the Straits of Mackinac, killing its driver, a waitress on her way to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Indeed, Yugos have sold for as much as $9500 on Bring a Trailer and for more than twice their original $3990 price at other locations—impressive numbers for a contraption based on Fiats dating to the Nixon administration. Many of these pricey Yugos appear to head right into collections. Joking aside, some people are putting their money where their mouth is.

Fifteen years ago, Jason Vuic, a credentialed professor with a Ph.D. in history, published The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, a 272-page book about the creatures. In an excellent 2022 Hagerty piece., Andrew Newton asked, “Is this $9000 Yugo the best worst car?” That article, and similar ones, join Vuic’s magnum opus in convincing me that Yugo affection is unmistakably real. Indications proliferate that Yugo is following the dented and demented wonderland occupied by King Midgets, bench seats, carburetor conspiracies, the Apperson Jack Rabbit, and their chittering devotees.

Need more convincing? Give the secret handshake to yugoamerica.com, where you are greeted with this: “Possibly the first and only website, registry, online gravestone, and knowledge repository dedicated to the vehicle with the most underdog spirit of them all of the last century, the mighty Yugo.”

On my first visit to this site, its webmaster greeted me with a flash news item: “I’ve started the enormous process of digitizing the factory Yugo parts catalog.” Dear god, I thought. Other sections of the website revealed that a Yugo owner’s registry is under construction. The final bit of clinical evidence for Yugo Adoration Syndrome? The webmaster was in his second year of Yugo GV ownership.

The good news is that digitizing a Yugo parts catalog and creating a Yugo registry takes more than time and printer ink. Such projects are beyond hobbies, beyond dedication. They are irrefutable evidence of zealotry. And no cult worth the name can survive without zeal.

Just sayin’.

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William Jeanes was editor-in-chief of Car and Driver and publisher of that magazine and Road & Track. He was chief judge at the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance for 17 years.