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
Normally I’d say, “I’ll bet there was a lot of beer involved with that!”, but this is on an entirely different level.
So the Facebook person ruined two classic cars? A great and noble undertaking indeed.
What I want to know is what is sitting next to the Yugo with tin snips – no, I don’t want to know what the snips were used for – and a quart of oil on the fender. Whatever it is, do I need to save it from being mounted on top of a modern Crown Vic?
Edit: I see below it is identified as a 46 (or maybe 42) Caddy. I take that as a “yes” to my question, but I can’t afford to buy it. Somebody save it from being a decoration on a Crown Vic, please.
Does it have wood bumpers?
Nope. Must be a 42
And then there’s this thing, not as hacked up but someone on staff should use it to scare David since it already looks like one of Jason’s “car Halloween costumes”: 1988 Jeep Cherokee Testarossa! : r/WeirdWheels
I love that they leather wrapped the spoiler on the roof too! Gotta appreciate the dedication to craftsmanship there.
I’ll take two of ’em.
This just goes to show how hard it is to come up with a new idea. No matter what you think of, someone has already tried it, regardless of how unique or, especially in this case, stupid it might seem.
Well for ten thousand, bank draft or certified money order only, I’ll take it off their hands.
This is even shittier than it appears…
The sharpest of eyes will notice the pedal situation.
Roughly 94 percent of the 117,000 TR7s made were three-pedal manual transmission cars, the crappy imploding 4-speed on the early TRs, and the much better LT77 5-speed on the ’77 through ’81 models.
The other 6 percent of TR7s sold were two-pedal automatics. Triumph used a yester-tech Borg Warner Type 35, and it sucked the life out of the 89.9 horsepower TR7 slant four.
And that’s what we have here under that Yugo body: an automatic (read: anemic) TR7.
Not having to stretch to the clutch pedal solves at least one ergonomic puzzle of how far to raise the driver’s seat to see over the Yugo dashboard and reach the steering wheel once you rig a bicycle chain between it and the sawed-off Triumph steering column.
An automotive horcrux if ever I saw one.
Momma always said “Make good choices”
Someone didn’t listen.
In the last pic it appears they stopped just shy of getting that stock ’46 Cadillac bumper to fit.
Every day, we stray further from God…
This thing looks worse than ex-football player Rosie Grier and Ray Milland in that horrible movie “The Thing with Two Heads”.
https://www.blaxploitation.com/images/poster_gifs/poster_thing_with_2_heads.gif
Thanks, now I’m strangely drawn to tracking that down.
Here is a Youtube link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt670gaAmSg
If they were going to leave that much of the TR7 cowl, they could have at least left the TR7 dash installed to make it funnier
And the TR7 dash is actually quite nice
Oh it’s that one. Guy has bene trying to sell it for a long time. I guess trying to be entertaining in a hack way is more powerful then a case of beer. But I suspect malt liquor or Canadian whiskey was involved in such poor decision making.
Also it’s more internet famous then I can see YouTuber famous. It’s almost a pr stunt for the guys channel at this point.
I’m guessing it was a lot of washer fluid, perhaps the orange stuff.
It did not taste like creamsicle, but damn – it packed a punch!
Might have been the orange flavored coolant too. I don’t imagine they had any of the blue raspberry or strawberry.
Yu-go to the hospital to get a tetanus shot
Shitish Leyland
Sometimes the crusher is the only option.
Not true!
There’s fire too.
Only if it’s hot enough to turn that vomit inducing silhouette into a shapeless molten puddle.
Easy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
Came here to suggest Thermite, not surprised you beat me to it.
What about Marmite?
Wesley or Beverly?
Would crush the good doctor, for sure.
First step: get it runn……..(quick reconsideration)…..,er, get it burning.
This is the kind of decision someone who owns both of these cars would make.
(Building it, not selling it. I bet that was someone else’s idea.)
…and y’all complain about the cars I choose…
… tomorrow, on SBSD…
Yugo body “mounted” on a TR7 vs. TR7 body “mounted” on a Yugo.
I vote CP today.
I am pretty sure you mean crack pipe, but there are worse things CP is an acronym for.
… Canadian Pacific?
Communist Party?
Cow patty
At least cow patties can be used as fertilizer.
It’s sad people are still clinging to the original Jalopnik phrase so many years after it was changed to something less fraught. It’s extra sad when that phrase now means something even worse.
What was wrong with Crack Pipe? I still can’t figure out why implying that hard-drugs are bad, and that drugs and drug seeking behaviors may even lead to bad decisions, is offensive. Drugs are still bad, right?
And the “thing even worse” has existed forever, regardless of what it’s called.
Are people just offended that bad things even exist and have names?
I’m honestly not trying to be a jerk. I don’t understand.
At Marti Gras this year there was a float that said Crack Pipe on it, and the people on the float tossed out black dolls with bead nooses around their necks. Even if you don’t personally think it’s racist, racists seem to.
The crack epidemic disproportionately affected the Black community. Why use that phrase when another does the job just as well and doesn’t hurt anybody?
https://www.jalopnik.com/at-2-900-will-this-high-mileage-2000-vw-gti-vr6-get-h-1844665260/
https://www.jalopnik.com/wrapping-up-2020-for-nice-price-or-no-dice-1845923590/
I mean, if you get the Yugo shell properly attached to the Triumph floor/chassis legs/etc., you are a brief trip to the junkyard to get an old Range Rover 3.5 liter engine, at which point you can have what I might guess is the only V-8 powered Yugo in the woooorllllld.
It would be glorious.
The only one with just one V8, you mean!
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37930/two-500-cubic-inch-cadillac-v8s-and-all-wheel-drive-make-this-yugo-totally-rip
Look at the bright side. Someone out there might have a Yugo with a bad body, and a TR7 with a bad frame. This could be their dream come true!
This Yugo was fitted to the TR7 much like a 1950s nylon toupee to a myopic bald blind guy.
Or an ally behind a dive bar late on a Friday night,