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To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, the Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1985, Americans were beginning to become acquainted with CDs, Super Mario Brothers, and a car from communist Yugoslavia imported by an eccentric entrepreneur with a desire to do what men like Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche had done before him, sell a cheap everyman car to the masses. The car would go on to be considered one of the worst ever released. Here to tell the story of the Yugo is Jason Vueck, author of The Yugo, the rise and fall of the worst car in history.
Take it away, Jason. Introducing the new Yugo, a Paramount Engineering achievement from Yugoslavia. So in short, I don't think it was the worst car ever made.
Now, with that being said, I'm not defending it. It was not a good car. It was poorly built, cheaply built, cheap parts, dirty.
It was loud. It didn't even have a glove box. It didn't have a radio. You couldn't move the steering wheel up and down to fit the way you sat.
Sorry, Charlie. It was just you got what you got. It was a moped with four wheels.
And what American culture kind of required was status and quality. And the Yugo had no status. And the Yugo had very little quality.
And so the Yugo became known as the worst car ever sold in history in America or elsewhere. The Yugo story really is a meeting of two different things, communist Yugoslavia and Malcolm Bricklin. Bricklin was from Philadelphia originally. I think he was a Jewish kid from Philadelphia. Then his father moved to Florida.
He went to high school, I believe in Orlando, and attended University of Florida for a little bit before quitting to start businesses. You know, he didn't drop out because, you know, he couldn't do the work. He certainly could. He just he had places to go and sitting in a biology class wasn't going to get him there. That's the way he saw it. He was an idea man. I've got an idea.
Let's go. Bricklin was what business school professors have studied him and called him a serial entrepreneur. There's actually a term, serial entrepreneurship, and that's selling a business, starting a business, selling a business, you know, going bankrupt, starting another business, but perpetually starting businesses. And Bricklin came out of the era of the 1960s in which franchises were king. You know, every small town in America, if you were the first one in with a McDonald's, you suddenly became wealthy.
You know, you got the next McDonald's in your territory and the next McDonald's. And that's how Bricklin saw the world. He tried to take his father's handyman hardware stores and franchise it. He had a rented Rolls Royce and he had scooters in the trunk and he would pull up it in the 60s. He would pull up it, you know, small gas stations and try to sell them a scooter franchise to get, you know, young people to buy mopeds at these garages and auto body shops, that kind of stuff.
He then tried to import jukeboxes that played little films at your table and, you know, when you're out eating at a restaurant. Then he moved on from Italian scooters to Japanese scooters from Fuji Heavy Industries, and that led to Subaru. That was the company that made Subaru. So he brought over the first Subarus and started a dealer network. You know, he got investors, he got dealers that wanted in, and this was the early days of Toyota and Honda in America.
Subaru was another brand. And so that was what floated his boat. He was a wheeler dealer. He was a talker, a great talker, a great presenter. He was magnetic. People who knew him were always blown away at his presentations, blown away at his personal, how vivacious he was and full of energy and life and how committed he was to new projects and ideas. He would have been great for Silicon Valley and Pets.com or something like that.
You know, he would have run with it and gotten people excited. He used to give presentations for Subaru, and when it first came over, it was Subaru. And he would get the dealers to stand up and go, one, two, Subaru, and they would cheer and yell and jump up and down and get people excited to sell. But when things went south, he never really turned out to be a particularly good administrator, a good manager of businesses. He didn't manage his money well, and his response to when things would go south was to try to find more investors.
And when that failed, to just ghost the entire endeavor, try to sell out or get out, go bankrupt and move on to another project. And so that is how Malcolm Bricklin eventually came to the Yugo. He went from jukeboxes to scooters from Italy to Japan to Subaru. Subaru started to tank. A new family came in and took control of the company if Malcolm would leave, which led him then to kind of a kit car called the Bricklin SV-1, this fiberglass-bodied gull-winged-door sports car, which he named after himself, the Bricklin.
That was a major failure, but it was exciting. He promoted soul singers, I read somewhere, and then he got back into cars with the Bertone and the Pininfarina Spyder. And when that started to go south, he needed a car desperately. And this is like in 1984, early 1985, and the car he found was the Yugo.
He and his boys, his car guys, were walking down a London street. They were trying to purchase or acquire Aston, these little mini cars, and that didn't work. And as they were walking down a London street, the story is one of his car guys saw this little Fiat-looking car, and it had the mark on it, J-U-G-O. And the guy said, Jugo. What does this mean?
Well, J is Y in Serbo-Croatian language. So it was a Yugo. And one of his men said, well, this is a Fiat. We know how to do Fiats. I've sold Fiats before. You know, we can certainly work with this car.
Who makes it, and how much is it? You know, we need a car. We're going to go bankrupt, our importation firm. And so Bricklin was then onto his who knows how many businesses in.
He's probably 40 years old, and he becomes a car importer of the Yugo. When we come back, more of this story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
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Individual results may vary. Addi or flibanserin is for premenopausal women with acquired generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have had low sexual desire no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation or the sexual partner. This low sexual desire is troubling to them and is not due to a medical or mental health problem, problems in the relationship or medicine or other drug use. Addi is not for use in children, men or to enhance sexual performance. Your risk of severe low blood pressure and fainting is increased if you drink one to two standard alcoholic drinks close in time to your Addi dose. Wait at least two hours after drinking before taking Addi at bedtime. This risk increases if you take certain prescriptions, OTC or herbal medications or have liver problems and can happen when you take Addi without alcohol or other medicines. Do not take if you're allergic to any of Addi's ingredients. Allergic reaction may include hives, itching or trouble breathing. Sometimes serious sleepiness can occur.
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Quick question. Speaking of workouts, how would you rate your athletic program? Bro, we're in the middle of the state championship.
Oh, so like a B plus then. Dude, get out of our huddle. Well, at homes.com, we leave it all on the field to get you detailed information on local schools. Off the field. Off the field. Copy. All right. Go sports. How did he even get in here?
Homes.com. We've done your homework. Have you ever looked around at your crew and thought, man, these are my people. The ones who turn the smallest moments into memories you'll be talking about for years.
The folks who show up when you need them and make your life so much better. Well, now you can make those moments even sweeter because share a Coke is back. And this time it's all about celebrating friendships, whether you're hanging out, watching the game or just chopping it up. There's a Coke for everyone from bestie and bro to classic names like David and Sarah.
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Next time you're making memories, don't miss your chance to share a Coke with all your favorite people. And we return to our American stories and the story of the Yugo with Jason Vueck, author of the Yugo, the rise and fall of the worst car in history. When we last left off, Jason was telling us about Malcolm Bricklin, the serial entrepreneur who dabbled in everything from promoting soul bands to being the first person to import Subarus to America. After being pushed out of Subaru and working on several other projects, Malcolm needed a new car to avoid bankruptcy. The car he found was the Yugo, a car from communist Yugoslavia. Let's continue with the story.
Here again is Jason Vueck. To understand the Yugo, you also have to understand communist Yugoslavia. During World War II, Yugoslavia had been a kingdom and it was invaded really from all sides by the Italians, by the Germans. Romania took a piece, the Bulgarians. Yugoslavia was ripped apart and not only was invaded, but went into a civil war.
Serbs and Croats and Muslims and others killing each other violently. And in the middle of all this, Tito, Joseph Brause, he was a communist organizer, had this wild life. He fought in World War I and became a Bolshevik in a POW camp deep in Russia and came home and worked underground through the 30s.
And when World War II started, he was head of the Communist Party, had maybe 2,000 secret clandestine members, mostly students in the country. And as the war became more and more violent, the civil war became more and more violent, he was the only one saying, you know, we're pro-Yugoslav. Yugoslavia means land of the southern Slavs, Yuga means south. And so he was the only one saying Serbs and Croats, you know, he himself, he was a half-Croat, half-Slovenian. You know, one of his right-hand men was Serbian, some of his military leaders were Serbian. He had an advisor who was Jewish and he said, join us, join me, we will fight the oppressor.
We will stop fighting the civil war and we will liberate the country. And by the end of the war, he had liberated, largely on his own, whole swaths of Yugoslavia. And the country was freed, not really by the Soviets or by the Americans, but by a local communist leader who was wildly popular. I mean, there were people that didn't like him and certainly his rivals were either killed or fled, but Tito had liberated Yugoslavia. He was a war hero along the lines of FDR and Churchill and Stalin.
I mean, he really kind of was that larger-than-life figure, this very popular figure, even in the United States. And in 1948, Stalin was taking over, taking over Eastern Europe and was trying to take control of Yugoslavia and Tito broke away. And so immediately, the United States and the West began sending Yugoslavia arms and buying its goods and giving it loans. We gave it most favored nation status. And so, though we were rabidly anti-communist in the United States, if you picked up a paper in the 50s, Tito was a maverick or a good communist, right? We were very cynical about that. He wasn't Soviet, so fine, he's a communist, but it's a developing country, let him do what he wants.
And that was very, very important to us. And so Tito had to kind of skate down the middle during the Cold War. He would buy oil and coal and whatever raw materials from the Soviets for his factories and then sell Finnish goods to the West.
So he was playing both sides. Getting back to the Yugo, Yugoslavia was massively in debt. They lived way beyond their means. Tito dies in 1980 and people are wondering in 1980, will the Soviets invade? Will there be another civil war?
People are wondering, you know, what's going to happen? The country was getting poorer and poorer, debts were coming due. And so the Yugoslavs were desperately looking for ways to sell their natural resources, to sell their products. Anything and everything they could sell, they wanted to sell and our State Department helped them.
That was what our embassy largely did in the 80s, tried to get American companies to shake hands with Yugoslav companies, Dow Chemical and Westinghouse, working in the region. And so one company there called Zastava, it means red flag, as in the red flag of communism. It was an arms manufacturer, metals manufacturer. It was a big conglomerate. It did a lot of different things and it also began producing military vehicles. And that turned into consumer cars, fiats. These weren't bad cars. They were certainly the best of the East European cars, which isn't saying much. You're not winning a gold medal there, but it was still better to own a Yugo than a Lada or a Trabant.
Trabants were terrible. The Yugo was a Fiat. And so eventually they had produced millions of cars. About a million Yugos were produced in Krogljevac, a town a couple hours south of Belgrade, not that far.
Kind of a Youngstown, Ohio, a ruddy industrial town. And that's where Bricklin went to negotiate bringing the Yugo to the United States. Bricklin was simply looking for a new product. He was kind of down on his luck and re-emerged in the early 80s with the Pininfarina and Bertone cars. They were fiats. They were nice little cars, but they were fairly expensive and they'd already been sold in America and hadn't done well. And his CFO, Ira Edelson, his accounting guy, came to him and said, Malcolm, if we don't have a new car, and I think it was like 60 days or 90 days or several months, whatever, if we don't find a new car, a new product that these dealers can sell, we will go bankrupt.
So this is like 83, 84, and so the story is they begin scouring the world. It's he and his inner circle of car guys. They were scouring the world, looking for cars. The one story is they tried to get Jaguar.
Jaguar wasn't going to sell to Bricklin. They were trying to get the Aston. They were looking all over the place when they saw this Yugo in London. On the street, they looked it up and they contacted the Yugoslavs and set up a meeting. They go over to Belgrade.
They fly over. They've let the American government know they're interested in this Yugo car. They let the embassy know and they've hired Lawrence Eagleburger. Later, he became Secretary of State. He was an ambassador to Yugoslavia that was really liked by the Yugoslavs. He worked for Kissinger Associates, Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, and companies would hire Kissinger to give them entree around the world at the highest levels. So once they hired Lawrence Eagleburger, doors at the American embassy opened. Eagleburger was no longer in government service at that time, and also doors at the Yugoslav government opened. He knew everyone, and he sat on Yugo America's board.
So he went in guns blazing. So they get over there to look at this new car, this Yugo. It's not new.
It was first started in the 80s, but it was new to Bricklin. So they stay, I believe, at the Intercontinental in Belgrade at the hotel. And some workers from the Zastava factory drive these Yugos up to Malcolm Bricklin and park them in the parking lot of the Intercontinental. And he and his assistant, a man named Tony Semenara, a car guy who had worked with fiats, they start to look at the car. And Tony's really the car guy. He opens the trunk and he opens the hood and he starts the car and drives it around. And he's like, yeah, this is a Fiat. You know, it's a simple Fiat.
I can work with this. But he opens the trunk and he sees rust in the paint. He sees rust in the paint of a new car. It didn't mean that the metal was falling apart. It meant that microscopic particles of metal was getting into the paint. Their quality control was terrible. They were just grinding metal inside a giant factory. Metal would get in the air and it would get into the paint in a different part of the factory, which was completely different than the way the Americans did things.
You know, you could probably eat off the floor, have surgery in a room where they paint American cars. Not the Yugo. And so Tony Semenara actually said to Bricklin, Malcolm, this is not good. We've got to get out of here.
This is bad. And then they went to the plant. And you're listening to author Jason Vueck. And his book is The Yugo, The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. We're also getting a story of serial entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin.
He's got a real problem and he's trying to solve it with what is clearly a subpar car. And by the way, we're also getting a nice look into communist Yugoslavia and its manufacturing standards. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of the Yugo and how it came to America and who brought it here.
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I didn't realize you did that. Yeah, we can also send you samples fast and free. Wow, I mean I always thought I needed a designer to come to my home, but scheduling is always a nightmare.
Not with blinds.com. We're on your schedule and there's no haggling, no pressure, no hidden fees either. Hmm, I just might have to do more. Oh, okay, whatever you need. How about you tell me what you had in mind? Okay then, so the first room we're looking at is for guests coming in. Blinds.com is covered over 25 million windows, all backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Shop blinds.com now and save up to 40% site wide. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there, feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addi.
And let me tell you, I've seen firsthand what a difference it can make in how you feel. Addi is the only FDA approved pill clinically proven to help certain premenopausal women have more interest in sex, have more satisfying sex, and lower the stress from low libido. Addi has helped hundreds of thousands of women get their drive back, including me. Talk to your doctor or visit addyi.com to learn more about Addi, the little pink pill.
Individual results may vary. Addi, or flibanserin, is for premenopausal women with acquired generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have had low sexual desire no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation, or the sexual partner. This low sexual desire is troubling to them and is not due to a medical or mental health problem, problems in the relationship, or medicine, or other drug use. Addi is not for use in children, men, or to enhance sexual performance. Your risk of severe low blood pressure and fainting is increased if you drink one to two standard alcoholic drinks close in time to your Addi dose. Wait at least two hours after drinking before taking Addi at bedtime. This risk increases if you take certain prescriptions, OTC, or herbal medications, or have liver problems, and can happen when you take Addi without alcohol or other medicines. Do not take if you are allergic to any of Addi's ingredients. Allergic reaction may include hives, itching, or trouble breathing. Sometimes serious sleepiness can occur. Common side effects include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and dry mouth. See full PI and medication guide, including boxed warning, at addi.com slash PI.
Visit addi.com to learn more about Addi. Huddle up. We got one play. Everything we work for comes down to this.
Quick question. Speaking of workouts, how would you rate your athletic program? Bro, we're in the middle of the state championship.
Oh, so like a B plus then. Dude, get out of our huddle. Well, at homes.com, we leave it all on the field to get you detailed information on local schools. Off the field! Off the field. Copy. All right. Go sports. How'd he even get in here?
Homes.com. We've done your homework. Have you ever looked around at your crew and thought, man, these are my people. The ones who turn the smallest moments into memories you'll be talking about for years.
The folks who show up when you need them and make your life so much better. Well, now you can make those moments even sweeter because share a Coke is back. And this time it's all about celebrating friendships, whether you're hanging out, watching the game or just chopping it up. There's a Coke for everyone from bestie and bro to classic names like David and Sarah.
These special cans and bottles are made for your whole squad. So grab one, crack it open and toast to the people who make life worth celebrating. But don't wait.
They won't be around forever. So grab one for everybody. Pop the top and keep the good vibes flowing.
Next time you're making memories, don't miss your chance to share a Coke with all your favorite people. And we return to our American stories and the story of the Yugo with Jason Vueck, author of The Yugo, The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. When we last left off, Malcolm Bricklin and his car guys had gone to the U.S. And we returned to our American stories and the story of the Yugo with Jason Vueck, author of the Yugo, The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. When we last left off, Malcolm Bricklin and his car guys had gone to Yugoslavia to check out the Yugo. And what they found had astounded them. There was rust in the paint.
The cars were cheaply built, but Malcolm wasn't deterred from his vision of importing the car to America. So we went to the Yugo plant. Let's return to the story.
Here again is Jason Vueck. They drive a couple hours south to this gritty industrial town, giant plant from pre-World War II. You know, the floor was just filthy, like the filthiest auto body mechanic shop you've ever been in, where your shoes get dirty, walking around in that dirty, dark, oily floor. And there's workers standing in the muck and standing on the dirty floor and then putting their feet into new cars to put in, you know, carpet or to put in the seats or to do whatever the assembly line workers do. But there's no quality control. It's just filthy dirty. The workers, you know, are eating right next to the assembly line. Some of them are drinking alcohol.
You know, they're smoking. This was not something you would see at Ford. They just didn't have any understanding of quality control whatsoever. And that was largely because there was no competition. This was a singular large car company.
There were a few smaller ones in Yugoslavia. But you would order a car. You didn't go pick out the color. You didn't have a salesman.
Salesmen, you know, really in communist theory were parasites, right? That was another level between you and the producer, the buyer and the producer. You know, so you would simply go to a Zastava office in your town and say, you know, I'm ready to buy a car.
I've saved a little money. Six months, nine months later, a car would appear. They'd call you and say, your car's here.
And it didn't matter what the interior looked like, what the exterior. And you were just given a car. And so there were no competing offers from other companies. You know, the buyer had no power to say, I'm not buying this. I'm going to another company. That didn't happen.
And so the Yugo's quality was just horrific compared to American producers. And so Tony Simonaris says to Malcolm, we got to get out of here. This isn't worth it. This car. And he's like, look around. Look at this plant. It's old, yes, but look, there's a large workforce here. They're motivated to sell this car. What would it take for us to build a plant to ever have this chance that we can clean this up? Look on the bright side.
Ever the salesman, he sold it to his own man, his own car guy who knew Fiat intimately, and he won them over. There's rust in the trunk. Big deal. We'll teach them not to do this. We'll fix the painting process.
We'll fix this. And what we can't fix, we'll bring in outside vendors and we'll bring in our own parts. They had to kind of teach the Yugoslavs to tighten up. And they even created a Yugo America line, a Yugo A line, where the better workers would come.
The workers that were gold driven, you know, instead of the average worker, you know, where the old communist joke was, you know, then they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. These guys really work and they took great pride in being the ones who produced a better Yugo. Americans laugh at that, but the car they produced was far better. I forgot whatever the numbers were in the standards, but the crash tests, they barely passed, but they passed. I do know when I spoke to the guys who dealt with the crash tests that a most important thing that the Yugo slash Fiat derivative had going forward in the crash test was that the car tire was in the hood, in the front. The engine was in the front, but they put the car tire in there as well. And that car tire gave it enough bounce on their crash test that they actually passed. Now the emissions part, what they did is they simply got a Bosch carburetor.
So that's how they did it. But there were these really funny stories of the first Yugos being shipped over test cars in a shipping container. There's a movie Drowning Mona with Danny DeVito from the late nineties, I believe. And the storyline was that this was a town, it was like a murder mystery or something, a town in New York that was a Yugo testing ground.
That's not true. That was just a funny fictional testing ground in the movie. And in real life, there were two or three cars that were flown over by Yugoslav Air Transport, the yacht, the state airplane company.
They flew over to, I think, LaGuardia. And then they were driven around New Jersey by this Tony Simonara. And there are all these funny stories of just how chintzy this car was. Once he was driving over this old bridge, like over railroad tracks as a train's going by or something, and the seat just breaks and he falls backwards into the back seat. He's totally out of control.
Can't see. You know, another time he like drove it up onto his lawn and almost wrecked. And he made a massive list. One of the first fax machines in communist Yugoslavia was installed because of Yugo America. I think it was the first fax machine ever.
And he sent, I forget what it was in the book, but it was like a five meter fax. It was this giant list of hundreds of changes that Tony had come up with. You know, new screw here, new this there, new that, new type of, you know, everything from the design of the fabric to the paint. I know that Pittsburgh Paints got involved. They bought better paint. They changed this. They changed the antenna. They changed this.
They changed that. And all of these changes had to be made, not just emissions and not just crash, but all of these changes that Tony thought were going to be necessary to get people in the American market to buy it. And to their credit, these Yugoslav workers did that, you know, in spite of a culture that mitigated against creating a high quality product. Yugoslav workers weren't bad workers in any way. They weren't lazy. They could make a car.
That's pretty impressive. Think of how many countries in the world don't bother. But not being in a competitive environment is disastrous in the industrial process. If you build something, assemble something, produce a product that's not in a competitive environment, not in a free market, you're cruising for a bruise and eventually your product will be of less quality and a less value than someone who has to make constant perpetual improvements, which is how the Japanese really walloped Detroit. Detroit was monopolistic. Detroit, you know, had its protected market and didn't think anyone else would threaten it.
As the Japanese got better and better and better, we just didn't have the ability to respond. But imagine the Yugoslavs never having competed ever now have to send their derivative automobile to America. And to their credit, they did it. They did it. In some ways, it was pretty impressive that a communist country could send an automobile to America.
That seems so wildly insurmountable. But they did it. And Bricklin was the idea man who got everyone involved to do it.
So they signed the agreements. Bricklin, I think, paid $2,000 a car. The Yugoslavs told me he paid $2,500.
Who knows? But the car was $3,990 bare bones. And it was bare bones.
To American standards, it was very chintzy. But there were other people who saw it as very, very basic transportation that didn't want more than that. You know, I compare it to a moped. No one ever looks at a moped and says, oh, that's a nice moped. It's a moped.
It's point A to point B. And for $3,990, there were people who liked that. There was novelty in that.
You could only find used cars at that price. And so people wanted to see what was going on. The automotive press went crazy over Bricklin.
They went crazy over a communist car in Reagan's America. People began lining up at dealerships. They were selling like hotcakes. Some dealerships sold $200 in a day. And a lot of people loved this car. But when it was finally reviewed in early 1986 by Consumer Reports, and this really is the clear nosedive. And you've been listening to Jason Vueck, author of The Yugo, the rise and fall of the worst car in history. What happens next?
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Here again is Jason Vueck. The Yugo ascended and in early 1986, and I actually tracked down and I found the man who reviewed the car for Consumer Reports. I just cold called him out of the phone book. He was retired.
Very nice man. And Consumer Reports to this day, they test everything. And in those days, they had a lot of money.
They had millions of subscribers. So they would test mattresses by dropping, had a machine that would hit a mattress with a bowling ball 10,000 times to see what it would do to your side of the bed. They would test washing machines, washing clothes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a month to see how they did. You know, they would review anything and everything. And Consumer Reports was so powerful in those days. So if they reviewed something like a keyboard or a typewriter or a heater or, you know, a garage door opener and they said it wasn't good, that company could go bankrupt. That product would disappear from the shelves.
They would discontinue the line because people read it. And so when they reviewed the Yugo, you know, and when I spoke to the man who literally did the testing and everything was done privately. I just happened to find the guy who did it. He said it wasn't a bad car. It was a Fiat.
It was just an old, simple Fiat. This new Yugo was a dated automobile. And so my question was, was it better to buy a new Yugo or a good used car? And Consumer Reports said, well, you know, if you've got four grand to spend, you probably want to buy, if you can, a four or five year old Honda by an old Subaru. But you really don't want to buy this new car.
And one of the questions was, will there be a dealer network to service you? What happens if this if this company goes bankrupt? You're going to be orphaned. They call it being orphaned by a company.
You're going to be abandoned. What happens if you're not good at fixing cars yourself? This isn't rocket science. This wasn't a bad car to fix. It didn't have computers on board and you didn't need an engineering degree.
But if you don't know how to fix this car, it's probably better to buy a used car. When Consumer Reports said that, the Yugo mania when the car first came out was so crazy that I think the press kind of enjoyed, you know, you know, the car that people lined up for nine months ago is now being panned by Consumer Reports. That was national news. That alone. It collapsed.
Sales collapsed. Suddenly David Letterman is saying that. Other comedians. And it gets into our pop culture.
Once you get Letterman, you get TV shows. You know that Moonlighting, the show with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, the one that launched Bruce Willis's career. There's an episode where he wrecks several company cars, I think a BMW, and kind of as a joke, Cybill Shepherd, his love interest, she buys him a new Yugo. He tries to have the car stolen, tries to wreck it. He parks it in the worst part of L.A. with keys in the ignition and the joke is no one wanted it. And so by the end of the episode, there's a scene, it's a famous scene where he drives the Yugo into a grave. Yugo jokes came out. Why does a Yugo have rear window defrosters?
So it keeps your hands warm when you push it. A girl in my school had a Yugo and I remember guys would pick the car up and turn it perpendicular in her parking space so she couldn't get out. They didn't do that to someone with a Datsun or an old beat up Ford. They did it to the Yugo.
We thought it was funny. Then dealerships would have, one was a toy Yugo sales event. Buy a Toyota, get a Yugo free. Why did the Yugo rocket to infamy so quickly? There weren't that many buyers. It sold about 125,000 cars. I don't know the number specifically.
That wasn't bad. But that was a tiny, tiny hundreds and hundreds of a percentage of the American market over that seven or eight or nine year period. Most Americans had never seen a Yugo. Pop culture was such the force of the jokes and the joking really overtook the car and became, you know, kind of common knowledge. It was a truism that the Yugo was the worst car ever made.
Whether or not that was true or not. And again, I'm not defending the car. It was probably the worst car in the American market in 1986.
But it wasn't so bad that it deserved to be the Lampoon the way it was. It's a car. It got in music. It got into art. It got into everywhere. By 2000 on Click and Clack, NPR, you know, the Tapit Brothers, that funny show that's no longer on the air. They had a listener poll. What's the worst car of the millennium? And they voted the Yugo.
And I just thought, wow, I guarantee that most of these people hadn't seen a Yugo ever. But that is the way American pop culture was. And my theory and what I argue in the book is being a child of the 80s, I remember this was the era of, you know, you were what you wore. Designer labels. Gucci.
Fendi. This was the era when rappers and young kids, black and white, would rip a Cadillac symbol off the front, a hood ornament or a Mercedes hood ornament. You would rip it off of a car. I never did this. You'd rip it off a car and wear it around your neck.
I couldn't think of something that would say I'm more poor than stealing a hood ornament. But that somehow meant this is what I aspire to. This is what we valued. And I think the Yugo was countercultural. I just remember that I really would have died if my parents came home and said, we bought you a car and it was a Yugo. I really probably would have died at 16 years old if my parents had done that. In any other generation, it's a car.
Big deal. But in the 80s, it was countercultural. It was iconic for what you did not want to be seen. Kids would say it's a car you don't want to be seen dead in.
Right? And so when you have an entry level car that is a joke to the youth, I think you put that all together. Brickland salesmanship, sending the Yugo into the stratosphere of the media, and then also Consumer Reports, you know, casting it back down, plus the youth and the culture of the 80s.
The Yugo was just destined to fail. And so Brickland's accountant, his CFO, went to Wall Street trying to find investors. And again, he found, just like it happened to Brickland with the Subaru back in the late 60s, they found an investor, a Wall Street firm. They found money and offered to buy out Brickland, and he received several million dollars. I think it was four, maybe five million dollars, something, so he made money on the Yugo. But was, you know, immediately sued by dealers, and people claimed they ripped him off, and on and on and on, and probably had spent beyond his means, and he himself went bankrupt.
But Brickland got out, I believe, in 87 or 88. The car survived, but was failing under new management, and then itself went bankrupt. So, you know, this ends with a Yugoslav Civil War.
This ends with a country falling apart in 1992, starting in 1991. So the Yugo collapses. Everything was sold.
The car was no more. And so the Yugo doesn't exist anymore. You can go to Serbia today and see Yugos on the street. They still service them. There's still people that can fix them.
There's still parts available. But in general, the Yugo is a very rare bird. I bet, I bet there's a hundred in America on the road, maybe a hundred. I know that Florida in the early 2000s had two or three registered Yugos out of 17 or 18 million cars. So, you know, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Yugo. So, you know, that's kind of the Yugo story in a nutshell. You know, the rise and fall and the creation of us, of an American icon, right? I can't think of a greater icon for failure now that the generation that knew the Edsel, which had a different reason for failing, wasn't that bad of a car. Once that generation is gone, the Yugo is our Edsel. The Yugo is our great failure. I don't really know anything else of a product.
Clear Coke, maybe. Laser discs, maybe, is a failure. But I don't know anything at that level of failure for a product. Maybe Enron, you know, maybe some other failures in the internet. But nothing for a product has even approached the Yugo in terms of its, you know, how much it's been lampooned and taken to heart by the American populace as one of the worst products ever sold. It wasn't a good product, but it wasn't as bad as people said, and it probably was a decent deal at $39.90, to tell you the truth. It got you where you needed to go, but that wasn't enough.
That wasn't enough for American culture of the 80s and for Americans even today. And a terrific job on the editing, storytelling, and production by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Jason Vueck, author of The Yugo, The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.
It's available wherever you buy your books. The story of the Yugo, the story of the rise and fall of the worst car in history, here on Our American Stories. Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort. It takes the right financial foundation and support. That's where Chase for Business comes in.
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