Q: What’s included in every Yugo’s owner’s manual? A: A bus schedule.; A TFT Review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

So the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were in Los Angeles. The Soviets thought the CIA was going to drug Russian athletes and “trick” them into defecting so the Soviet Union and its allies refused to compete. The Americans were upset because we thought this meant no one would watch the Olympics; ABC felt ripped off, and the Olympic committee nearly refunded ABC more than $90 million in fees. (Repeat: $90 million in 1984.) But then Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet boycott and competed, endearing itself to the United States and setting the stage for the American debut of the “simple, utilitarian, and honest” Yugo. The Yugo, which had been manufactured by Zastava Automobiles in Kragujevac (the “Serbian Detroit”) for seven years, went on sale in the U.S. on August 26, 1985 with the tag line “Yugo, $3,990. The Road Back to Sanity.”

It was the cheapest new car ever. Some places would let you pay $99 down and $99 a month. The man responsible for bringing the Yugo across the pond was Malcolm Bricklin, a crook and a genius, who realized that Americans wanted something cute and cheap. In 1984, he told the Dallas Morning News: “It looks a little like everything out there…it looks like a Rabbit, it looks like a Colt, it looks like a Tercel. It looks like all the cars in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range, except it’s under $4,000.” The car itself was worth about $2,000. But Bricklin was moving forward with no capital. He accepted advance franchise fees from car dealers, which were supposed to remain in escrow accounts, and used them to cover his operations costs. He made dealers provide him with $400,000 letters of credit, which he then used to secure loans, which he then used to buy the cars from Yugoslavia. By 1984, he’d declared bankruptcy three times. He wore “silver and turquoise jewelry, Indian beads, a big belt buckle, pointed cowboy boots, a straw rodeo hat, and a wide leather belt with MALCOLM spelled out in silver studs.” His neighbor says, “he had such flare.”

Tony Ciminera, then Vice President of International Auto Importers, drove a Yugo over “a historic one-lane bridge that crossed over a very busy set of railroad tracks.” As Ciminera crossed the bridge: “the driver’s seat gave way. ‘The weld snapped and I’m suddenly laying flat. My head was on the backseat. I was totally prone. I couldn’t reach the steering wheel anymore. But the car’s still moving and I’m trying to steer it with my knees…’”

In spite of such obvious crappiness, and despite the fact Bricklin was flying by the seat of his pants, the Yugo sold. It showed enough promise in its first year on the market that Chrysler tried to buy the rights to American distribution for $15 million. Bricklin declined the offer; sources say he wanted ten times that.

The climax of the book comes in January 1986. That’s when Consumer Reports panned the car in a cover story. The Yugo had been on the market for a little over one year. Yugo of Pensacola sold the most. Consumer Reports wrote: “The price is the come-on for the Yugo, but you can’t buy it for $3,990 (because of fees) and it’s hard to recommend at any price.” The Yugo had the 8^th highest death rate, with “3.6 occupant deaths per ten thousand cars.” The car did not accelerate quickly enough.

But it was really cheap and it had sold well! By April 1986 Yugo America had sold 10,000 cars. Of course, more trouble was coming. The car was the butt of a joke on Dragnet. Jay Leno said: “More problems for Dr. Kevorkian, the suicide doctor. It seems the makers of the Yugo are suing him for copyright infringement.”

By 1988, Yugo America had a net worth of $3.2 million, but was losing $1.5 million a month in operations. A now-defunct New York brokerage firm agreed to bail the company out, provided Bricklin leave and not come back. The firm planned to team up with Mitsubishi to sell Yugo-like cars, manufactured in Malaysia, called the Proton Saga. Bricklin was furious, but in April of 1988, he agreed to sell his shares, and the shares of his sons, for $13 million. He got lucky. Mitsubishi flaked on the deal and the brokerage firm lost an estimated $10.5 million on “nine utterly boneheaded months of work.”

In January of 1989 Yugo America filed for bankruptcy. They were sued, sued, sued. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America formed a special Yugo-suing group. In September of 1989 there was a terrible Yugo accident on a bridge in Michigan. People thought the car got “caught by a sudden gust” of wind and blew away, over the bridge, into the water.

Around this time, Bricklin was sued by Citibank for a $98,171 balance on his Diner’s Club card. His helicopter was repossessed. He owed the IRS almost $400,000. By 1991, Bricklin had less than $50,000 in assets and was $20 million in debt to more than 150 creditors. In one case, a judge issued a $17 million dollar judgment against him.

Yugo America was completely out of business by April 1992 and warranties weren’t honored. Warranty lawyer Vernon Vig said: “I don’t know what happens in a case like Yugo. I think everybody’s probably out of luck.” On May 30^th, 1992 President George H. W. Bush “froze Serb accounts and prohibited American businesses and individuals from conducting trade business with and other transactions with Serbia and Montenegro.” (In the fall of 1992, Bobby Fischer violated the sanctions by playing chess against Borris Spassky. He was indicted, escaped to Iceland, died there.) Meanwhile in Kragujevac, Yugo’s manufacturer Zastava Automobiles, crushed by “war, sanctions and bankruptcy,” subsisted by manufacturing AK-47s. NATO started bombing Serbia on March 24, 1999. They bombed for 78 days, destroying Zastava’s power station, computer center, and assembly line. 124 workers were injured, and “mangled Yugos swung from conveyor belts.” The war ended in June of that year. Zastava, like all of Serbia, was broke and needed a foreign investor. Malcolm Bricklin stepped up. Inexplicably, Zastava signed a new deal with him in 2002, but, not surprisingly, the deal was dead one year later. Bricklin moved on to China where he failed to import a Chinese luxury car for Americans. This Yugo book is supposed to be funny and sometimes it is. I’d rather, though, read a biography of Bricklin.

In 2008, Fiat bought the company and officially killed the Yugo. Vuic estimates that there are 1,000 Yugos working today. “Stay Tuned,” Vuic writes, because “as of late 2008, the Serbian government was negotiating with officials in the Congo about moving the Yugo to Africa.”

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of Worst Car in History is one of those awesome magazine articles no one should have turned into a book. But since that has already happened, how come there’s not more Cold War drama? Vuic notes but does not discuss the relationship between Josip Broz Tito and the U.S. administration. When Tito withdrew from the Soviet Bloc, Vuic writes: “he took his Mediterranean ports with him, a coup of immeasurable importance to the U.S. Military…successive American presidents treated Yugoslavia like a ‘pampered child,’ giving it billions of dollars in aid and loans, most-favored trading status, and tons of military equipment.” We were cool with that. “We believe that cars do not have politics,” wrote Automative News in 1985. But still, how come Vuic doesn’t enlarge upon the claim that Yugoslavia successfully did “everything capitalists say socialists can’t do”? The Yugo, as a “product of a state-owned socialist enterprise” was snatched up by an American con-man and sold, for a profit, as the best of what socialism could offer us Americans by the dawn’s early light.

Hill and Wang, New York, 2010. 272 pp.

Photo: Flickr, Damian Corrigan