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Weekend Deviation – The Rise and Fall (Mostly Fall) of the Yugo

Posted: May 8th, 2010 | No Comments »

YugoMany moons ago I was one of very few people to ever achieve the honour of gaining a M.Phil in Socialist Theories and Movements. At the time the Soviet Union was still around (just), the Berlin Wall in place (but teetering) and China not so long embarked on reforms – North Korea, by the way, was pretty much exactly the same as now! My particular area of interest was waste in centrally planned economies – how come Russia could make tractors in vast numbers but not the spare parts to maintain them and so when a fan belt broke peasants got another tractor rather than repairing the one they had. All this in so many areas from condoms to plate steel led to enormous waste in the economies of the eastern bloc, lost production and shoddy products. Among those strange and often shoddy products to emerge from Eastern Europe was the Yugo, Yugoslavia’s own produced car . And like quite a few of those shoddy products the Yugo was pretty rubbish but had a certain charm.

The Yugo was a fascinating little thing – a friend of mine in Scotland bought one and became the only teenager I’ve ever known in Brtiain who had a car but still couldn’t get girls in Glasgow!! They were that naff. Jason Vuic’s new book The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History (which the Yugo wasn’t by the way – I’d give that award to the East Germans for either Trabant or the Wartberg) captures both the serious side of the Yugo – how building a car in a communist central planned state was doomed in so many ways and the fun – the book is sprinkled with Yugo jokes, the bizarre story of how the Yugo came to Reagan’s America etc. As ever no review here – publishers blurb below – but this is a great book about a much loved Commie icon and long overdue. And here…in all its glory on the UK promotional leaflet to tempt us all to Go Yugo!

422px-Go_Yugo

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR’s Car Talk declared it “the worst car of the millennium.” And for most Americans that’s where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand “good” communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you’ve got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.
Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia’s nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo . . . at the bottom.

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