Body swaps have resulted in some wild creations, and I’m not talking about the Shaggy D.A. here. Cutting the shiny side off of one car and welding it to the oily side of another has produced the awesome Roadkill Nascarlo, classic F-Series trucks that drive like 2000s Crown Vics, and at least one Morris Minor that’s actually a Prius. However, a unibody swap in particular is a wildly difficult procedure that’s easy to get in over your head on. That appears to be the case with this astounding attempt at Anglo-Slavic engineering.
You don’t have to know about cars to have a vague concept of what a Yugo is. It’s the $3,990 car that inspired a thousand jokes, an inexpensive Fiat 128-based Yugoslavian subcompact that caught the attention of Armie Hammer’s great-grandad before eventually being imported to America by the man behind the Bricklin SV-1. Sales of this slow but affordable machine did manage to peak at 48,812 units in 1987 before a rapid decline. Thanks partly to an emissions scandal, partly to conflict, and partly to UN sanctions on Yugoslavia, Yugo was done in America by 1992. Just in time for the demise of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself.
On the flipside, you do need to know a little bit about cars to understand the Triumph TR7. More than just a sports car shaped like a wedge of cheese, it was a British-made machine launched in January 1975. Now, early 1975 wasn’t exactly the finest time for the motor industry. In America, new emissions and safety regulations strangled big blocks, raised the ride height of sports cars, and tacked enormous five MPH bumpers onto either end of anything that moved. In Britain, tensions ran particularly high between workers and management at British Leyland, and due to a variety of economic issues, the automaker that owned Triumph was teetering on the verge of collapse when the TR7 launched. Perhaps that’s why it had a rather poor reputation for quality, even though I still like the car for inexplicable reasons.
Melding two such infamous cars into one ignominious creation sounds like an unwise idea, but that didn’t stop it from happening. Unsurprisingly, the result is now up for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $1,000, and it does unfortunately look less than the sum of its parts.
What you’re looking at here is a two-liter eight-valve single-overhead-cam slant-four in all its glory. Barely cresting the triple-digit mark when it comes to horsepower, it nevertheless represents a substantial upgrade over the mid-double-digits a stock Yugo made. Of course, it’s still attached to the underside of a Triumph TR7, but that bit of white cowling hanging over the engine is a hint of exactly what’s going on here.
Whew, that’s rough as old boots. While the wheelbases of a Yugo GV and a Triumph TR7 are only four-tenths of an inch apart, there’s a lot more to a body swap than just lining up the wheels in the arches. This Yugo looks like a monster truck because the bottom of its sills are sitting well above the floorpan of the TR7. Why? The next shot should make this abundantly clear.
Ah, yes, it appears the builder of this chimera simply sliced off the TR7 floorpan behind the rear wheels and mounted the Yugo body atop whatever was left via points like the rear valence. A body swap normally involves countless hours of cutting, welding, and massaging sheet metal to get two unrelated cars to merge like a zipper, yet this one takes a top hat approach.
The amount of air between the TR7 sills and the Yugo sills is especially apparent in this shot, which seems especially disconcerting for a number of reasons. Firstly, that’s a whole lot of camber for a MacPherson strut front suspension. Secondly, how exactly is the Yugo body actually attached to the guts of the TR7?
A quick gander at the seats and rear interior doesn’t turn up many clues. Not only does a bit of Yugo sheetmetal appear to overlap the TR7 seat itself, but I don’t see any substantial welds clearly holding everything together.
Perhaps the most cursed thing about this entire creation, however, is the dashboard, which appears to feature the Yugo’s entire dash structure perched atop the TR7’s dash structure. Look, you can even see the TR7 wiper spindles. This is, to use an industry-standard technical term, a clusterfuck. Really, what remains of the Yugo shell ought to be sectioned back to pretty much the base of the windscreen in order to get everything to sit more or less correctly. This means carefully slicing away at the cowl, the wheel wells, and what remains of the Yugo floor. Not to mention deleting what’s left of the TR7 spare tire well and trimming what’s left of the rear frame rails.
It’s theoretically possible to make this merging of two much maligned vehicles work. The wheelbases are close enough, and all-metal box flares can cover many sins, but it will require a great deal more time and effort than what’s been spent here. Someone could take on this project, but they’ll have to be an absolute masochist to see it to fruition. For now, what we have here is a proper horror show of a car.
Top graphic image: Facebook Marketplace
Pretty fine work, given they only had 45 minutes and a forklift to work with.
It’s real bad when every photo, no matter the angle, looks like it was taken for insurance purposes after an incident.
Somewhere out there is a Yugo drivetrain with a TR7 body perched on top.
I can’t decide which combination is the worse of the two.
Usually you try to combine a reliable or more powerful drivetrain with a desirable body, this is using the stuff at picknpull that nobody wanted to create something absolutely nobody wants it’s like kale and tripe
I dunno… I’d try kale and tripe if I trusted the cook. This thing, I don’t trust to stay in one piece if I were to turn the ignition.
Looks like we have the next project car for David Tracy to tackle, folks. Time for a subathon!
Today’s sponsors include:
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Regret
Only without the regret.
The sister of our president is even nastier than that.
At least it comes standard with a jagged metal kneecap separator…
This has “Hold my beer” written all over it.
This is so far away from a clusterfuck, I cannot begin to describe it. But I can provide metaphors.
This a cluster I ain’t fuckin that, no way. Insufficient beer gogglage. This is the the guy at the orgy with malodorous discharge.
I can see how you could make this work, and even work well-ish, but even then you’d have the unholy mashup of two less-than-reliable shitboxes glommed together into one ill-conceived – huh, look at that, some kind of fucking is at least implied – bad idea poorly executed.
Not “away” from a clusterfuck but “beyond” it. It’s clusterfuck transcendent.
Also, if you sit in the seats mounted on the TR7 floorpan, can you see out at all? You could probably bite the bottom of the steering wheel.