Yugo

~ the eulogy ~

The Yugo is a Fiat 128 with its rear end shortened into a hatchback, built in Kragujevac by Zastava, which had been assembling Fiats under license since 1953. Series production started on 28 November 1980 under the name Zastava Jugo 45, where the number meant horsepower. Over the next twenty-eight years it was also sold as the Koral, the Tempo, the Ciao and, in Italy, the Innocenti Koral. The last one, number 794,428, was finished on 11 November 2008, and Zastava stopped building cars of its own with it.

This arrangement is familiar to me from the other side of the Balkans. Tofaş was founded in Bursa in 1968 by Vehbi Koç with Fiat as partner, and from 1971 it built the Fiat 124 as the Murat 124, then from 1981 the Fiat 131 as the Kartal and the Doğan and later the Şahin. Those cars were Turkish traffic for my entire childhood, and they carried on in production until 2003. Same idea as Zastava: a country that could not buy current cars gets licensed rights to a previous generation, builds it for two decades, and ends up with a national vehicle that is technically an Italian one from before you were born. Yugoslavia did it in Kragujevac, Turkey did it in Bursa, and only one of the two got laughed at for it in English.

What separates them is that Zastava sold to America. Tofaş never tried. The Fiat 131 stayed inside its own market and its own export region, so nobody outside it ever formed an opinion, while the Yugo went to the Los Angeles Auto Show in May 1984 and spent the following decade being measured against cars built to a completely different set of expectations.

~ the dossier ~

~ great value ~

Malcolm Bricklin had already imported the Fiat X1/9 and the 2000 Spider after Fiat stopped selling them in America, so he had a distribution business looking for product. The first three Yugos went on the Los Angeles show stand in May 1984 painted in the colors of the American flag. Yugo America started selling in mid-1986 at $3,990 for the GV, with a ten-year warranty and free maintenance thrown in. GV stood for Great Value, and the advertising leaned on the number with a campaign built around 39-90.

It worked immediately. Total American sales came to 141,651 cars, and 48,812 of them went out in 1987 alone. For a couple of years the Yugo was the cheapest new car you could buy in the United States, which is a genuinely valuable position to hold, and Bricklin had reached it from a standing start with a Serbian factory and a twelve-year-old Italian design.

~ the punchline ~

Then the reviews caught up. The car ran on old-generation Fiat engineering and its build quality varied by the week, and American buyers who had paid $3,990 discovered they were still paying for something. Sales fell to 1,412 in 1992 and Yugo America folded in 1993. Unsold cars on dealer lots were written off as not worth moving.

The name then had a second life as a comedy noun. Late-night monologues and worst-car-ever lists kept it in circulation for thirty years after it stopped being sold, long past the point where anyone telling the joke had seen one. Jason Vuic wrote an entire book about it in 2010 with "the worst car in history" in the subtitle. None of that had much to do with the vehicle, which went on doing in Yugoslavia and its export markets exactly what a cheap hatchback is supposed to do, for another sixteen years after Yugo America closed its doors.

~ kragujevac ~

The Zastava works was one of the largest employers in Yugoslavia, with something on the order of fifty thousand people at the plant. Then the country it was built for stopped existing. Sanctions cut the export markets, and in 1999 NATO bombed the factory, hitting the automotive side rather than the arms side that shared the site. Production could not restart until 2000. The company kept going on the Koral and on a newer model called the Florida, and in October 2003 signed an agreement with Fiat to build the Punto in Kragujevac for Eastern Europe. That deal is the ending. Fiat came back to the plant it had licensed in 1953, the Yugo line was closed in November 2008 to make room, and the factory became Fiat Automobili Srbija. A Serbian car company spent fifty-five years building Fiats under someone else's name and finished by building them under Fiat's.

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