Decades from now, what do you think a car museum would most likely feature? If there’s going to be a section for 1980s and 1990s cars in a museum in the late 21st century, will there be any basic cars there to commemorate basic transportation, from A to B? Or will sports cars and supercars exclusively take their place in the limelight?
Pay a visit to any car museum today, and it’s highly unlikely that the preserved cars are ever going to be the base versions. The reason for that is straightforward: car enthusiasm tends to skew towards the exceptional.
Mention a car, any car, and its most memorable version is the one that gets talked about.
“I’m gonna drive home in my Mustang.” “It’s a GT, right?”
“I have a Peugeot 205.” “Is it a 205 GTI?”
“What about the Fiat Uno?” “Oh, I’d love to have the Uno Turbo.”
“Hey, there’s a Renault Clio.” “Man, remember the Clio Williams?”
“I used to have a Fiat Panda.” “Was it a 4×4?”
You get the idea. Originally, there have always been tons and tons of perfectly normal, bread-and-butter cars, with the occasional special edition or hot version working as a halo car – but because everybody would like to have the nicest version, those are the ones that end up preserved.
To combat this, the British have the Festival of the Unexceptional. As we’ve shown on our pages, FOTU is a show dedicated to the mediocre, a celebration of the crapcan. Any surviving first-generation Ford Mondeo is now a car worth pointing out. Opel and Vauxhall sold huge amounts of Vectras in the 1990s, but most of them have been scrapped. If nobody cared for the perfectly regular automobiles, they would eventually all be gone, with only the Turbos and GTIs and 4x4s preserved in museums. That’s why a 25-mile Yugo is such a big deal.
There wasn’t even a really hot version of the Yugo. (Except the ones without A/C, ha ha. Ha.) That said, this particular car does have the most powerful engine available for a Yugo: it’s the 1.3-liter fuel-injected unit, which has all of 67 horsepower. Sure, that’s still not a lot, but the car weighs just 2000 lbs, which helps. We’ve featured the Yugo and its various versions extensively in previous years, but a short re-cap is always worth the while.
Yugo Where I Go
The Yugo was an extremely cheap three-door hatchback produced by Zastava, a Yugoslavian manufacturer that originally made guns then licence-built Fiats. At its core, the Yugo was absolutely comparable to a lot of other small Fiats of the time: transverse, four-cylinder Fiat engine; front-wheel drive; and a transverse rear leaf spring. It was based on the Fiat 128, which had more doors and was also produced as a Zastava (the 101, with a large tailgate), but it was also closely related to the 127, which you might remember as one of the “Assan” cars in Gung Ho.
The Yugo wasn’t a rebadged Fiat, however, as Fiat didn’t sell it under its own name in any country. The closest it ever got to that was the Innocenti Koral; Innocenti was another Italian small-car brand that had built British cars in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, such as the Austin Allegro and the classic Mini. For a while, it also sold the Yugo, using the Koral model name with which the Yugo was known in its home country. I actually considered buying a Yugo for our Balkan trip in 2018, but ended up sourcing a Fiat Panda instead.
Malcolm Bricklin, who was also connected to early Subaru imports and the anti-De Lorean, the Bricklin SV-1, set up Yugo imports to the U.S. in the 1980s after an earlier company, YugoCars, couldn’t get the Yugoslavian cars certified for import. Bricklin’s company worked with the factory to get the cars compliant through numerous changes, and importantly, the car’s base engine was changed. Originally, the plan was to import Yugos with the 903cc (55 cu-in) OHV engine from the Fiat 127 and the Autobianchi A112, but Yugo America pushed for the overhead cam 1100cc engine, with ten more horsepower. It still wasn’t fast, but it was less slow.
I’ve only ever seen the above ad in connection with the Houston, We Have A Problem mockumentary about the fictitious Yugoslav space program, and I think it’s a parody. But it’s great to me, especially the tagline about dependability and safety having a totally new meaning.
Cheap Cars Vanish Easily
The cheapest available Yugo GV (Good Value) was advertised at $3,990, which is $12k today. As there isn’t anything available under $20k in the States these days, it seems particularly cheap, but in the late 1980s there were other easily affordable options. The Giugiaro-designed Hyundai Excel cost a grand more than the Yugo, and while it was still certainly bargain-basement, it offered more car. Chevettes and Horizons were available for under six grand, as was the cheapest Chevrolet Sprint, built by Suzuki.
Now, when have you last seen a nice example of any of those? An excellent Excel? A sprightly Sprint? A good condition Horizon that’s not a GLH? Because all of these cars were cheap, they weren’t necessarily kept up, and skipping maintenance made them worthless.
The Yugo, four-grand new or not, needed timing belt changes thanks to its SOHC engine. Had it been fitted with the original 903 engine, it would’ve been pushrod and free from timing belt maintenance.
Sure, it still would have needed oil changes no matter which engine it had, but by the time the belt needed to be done, the Yugos weren’t worth much, and an expense like that was easily skipped, until the belt ceased to be.
That’s why this Bring a Trailer Yugo is such a noteworthy thing. It does have the biggest engine, but it’s also practically new: it’s done 25 miles. Not 25,000 miles, 25. Whoever bought it new just stored it inside an enclosed trailer and barely used it other than to start it up once in a while. The seller says it was done to preserve it, which for a Yugo is a rare occurrence.
It’s not terribly hard to find a supercar that’s only done delivery miles. The Sultan of Brunei specialized in those, as he just played Gran Turismo with real cars and didn’t put serious miles on many of his vehicles. Lee Iacocca’s Ferrari still has 320 miles on the clock, and while it’s an interesting car, it’s easier to find low-mile Ferraris everywhere than low-mile Yugos. And this one is red, too, with Italian pedigree.
A 1990 model, it features big crash pads on the dashboard compared to the earlier cars. There’s probably a joke out there about knee protection in a Yugo, but I certainly hope those help.
Despite barely being used, and also because of it, the Yugo doesn’t work. The seller says it needs a fuel pump due to having sat unused for seven years – the original owners ran the car periodically up until then, after which it just slept in the trailer – and the engine turns over but doesn’t run. The current bid for the car is $5,555 at the time of writing, so even if it doubles, it would still be cheaper than what the car cost new. What a deal! Everybody needs a Yugo sometime.
In closing, I asked a Renault Twingo driving Croatian friend about what he thinks about Yugos. As he put it:
It’s a mode of transportation that mobilized Yugoslavia during a weird period of time. It was basic, it did the job, but the build quality wasn’t particularly great, and since it was the most recognizable car design (or product) of Yugoslavia, it has become a symbol of the period, and thus politicized.
It wasn’t awful for what it was, but in all fairness, it was never supposed to be much.
There you have it: for better or worse, it’s the Trabant of the Balkans.
All photos: Bring A Trailer
I’m a weirdo, so seeing a Diablo or Testarossa might ellicit a “huh, that’s kinda cool,” but a mint eighties Camry, a pristine BRAT, or a well-preserved Taurus wagon? I’m doing a double-take.
But what if that Taurus was an MT5?
Me…I’d take out a second mortgage.
What about a manual transmission Aerostar cargo van?
1981 Chrysler M-Body coupe with the one-year-only facelift?
Airbag equipped ’72 GM B-Body?
Yes please.
If it’s the ’86 only MT-5 wagon, I’m liquidating my 401k if necessary.
Right?
There’s one floating around that someone, for some reason, has turned into a National Lampoons Christmas Vacation tribute car…I can’t on earth figure out why, of all Taurus wagons, you’d take an MT5 and do that to it? And the seller KNOWS it’s an MT5…and still did it. And he wants a ridiculous amount of money for it, not for the manual transmission but for the “tribute” car aspect.
I remember stumbling upon a red MT5 wagon in my local Pick and Pull in high school, even then I knew it was an oddball, but I didn’t know just how odd.
I’ve seen that and had the same reaction: absolutely the last Taurus wagon you slap fake wood paneling on and mount a tree atop. What a waste.
I’ve never seen an MT-5 in person, running or otherwise. I’ve actually never seen any 2.5L Taurus. From digging around online and in Taurus forums, Ford basically did not make the 2.5L available here in Colorado, not even fleets and rentals (the base 2.5L L trim was basically made for the rental counter), since 88 horsepower just isn’t enough to climb the mountains.
I owned one of the spiritual successors to the MT-5, a 2014 Fusion with the 6-speed manual. I christened it the Fusion MT-6.
I’ve drooled over a MT Fusion for many years now…
I had it for 9 years. It was a great car, and the manual definitely made it more fun to drive. Not like an E90 or anything, but for a FWD family car, it was a hoot.
I’d love to have a car show of Normies of the ages. Especially if you could do the opposite of “look but don’t touch” and have a small course with some bumps and slow curves and parking spots for people to experience how they felt back then. I know my GenZ son and his friends would love it since one of them just bought an 80’s Town Car and they cruise around in it and think it’s amazing. They were blown away by the metal seat belt buckle. I explained that you used to be able to get belts made from those for a while after the cars were decades dead. There is something about experienced learning that is way better than viewing things on a phone screen.
I love this car. Used to have an ’87 GVX back in the day.
There was the GVX version, looking quite hot…
Behold: the 1988 Yugo GVX! (autoweek.com)
25 miles is as far as this car made it before it broke.
While your statement is technically correct, I would nonetheless classify it as unfair. 🙂
The truth is unconcerned with fairness, therefore it is unfair. I would agree with that.
“Because all of these cars were cheap, they weren’t necessarily kept up, and skipping maintenance made them worthless.”
All of those cars you mentioned were worthless even if the maintenance had been kept up.
The Fiat Spazio (and it even cheaper siblings Brio and Vivace) served the same purpose: cheap and sometimes cheerful. Props for the Assan factory (indeed a warehouse next to the Sevel factory in Buenos Aires), whose labor relations and product quality are fairly represented by the movie.
Any owner of a Fiat Spazio would have been mercilessly teased as I was growing up in the US. “Spaz” was a shortened version of “spastic,” which was a now retired medical term for those afflicted with cerebral palsy. I don’t know whether it’s become as radioactive as the “R-word,” but it’s equally insensitive.
I had two Vivaces (one nicknamed “El Vivace del amor”), so I guess that confirms my neurodivergence. A fun car to drive, and with an unkillable engine.
Ha! I had two (used) 504s. The first was “Winnie (the Peugeot)” and the second, “Genevieve Peugeot.” Likewise, fun (not exciting) to drive and very sturdy.
Because we are that weird, both the Spazio (and all Fiats) and the 504 were built in the same factory at the same time. Ah, the Chevrolet C10 too.
For a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it period in the early 90s, someone imported Yugo 45s to Portugal – something that made a lot of sense in paper, because while our economy had been booming since the country joined the EU in 1986, the working class was not feeling much of a trickle-down (surprising, I know), and cheap cars made a lot of sense in our domestic market. Not only that, they had engines that any mechanic could service, and spare parts were abundant due to the Fiat connection. But the timing was just awuful, and it’s hard to understand why no one thought of importing them to Portugal earlier, as they would’ve made even more sense throughout the 1980s
The ones I remember all had 1991 license plates, and imports stopped as soon as the Balkan war escalated in Bosnia and sanctions were imposed in early 1992. But for that brief period, their strong argument as the cheapest car you could buy new meant they moved a relatively decent number of units in a short period of time. They went as far as to add the Yugo Florida to the lineup, but I only ever saw one on the road – someone in my hometown bought a new one and kept it for a decade at least (they still had it when I left for college in 2001).
One thing I never heard around here was any talk of how bad they were. People seemed to agree they were basically ok for how little they cost, and since mechanical issues were easy to diagnose and fix, ownership didn’t seem to feel like much of a headache. But being cheap likley also meant they felt a bit disposable, and a simple fender-bender was enough for them to get scapped, as the one thing that became hard to come by as soon as imports stopped was body/trim parts. Always made me sad that they seem to have gone extinct around here (I don’t remember the last time I saw one with portuguese license plates; likely more than a decade ago). They were not as bad as their reputation in the USA made them out to be, even if they weren’t good either – just ok (which was fine for lots of export markets).
Oh wow, I have a correction to make: if the internet is to be believed, in 1991, the Yugo was just slightly more expensive than any Renault 4 model without extras here in Portugal (you could make a Renault 4 GTL cost a bit more than a Yugo if all of the extras were ticked off, but the showroom floor price for both TL and GTL models was lower than that of the Yugo). I always heard the Yugo was the cheapest car around here when it was being sold new, but it seems like that wasn’t the case, and it feels like I should have known this, due to which car actually held that title at the time.
Fun fact: for half of that year, both of these cars were being built in the same country; that changed in late June, when Slovenia declared independence, and the Renault 4 resumed its production run for another year and a half as a product of Slovenian carmaking, rather than Yugoslav.
The base 4L was cheaper? That’s a wild factoid.
I had every yearly “all the cars on the market this year” issue of the major auto magazines as a kid and thought I’d memorized all the prices, but clearly not!
Another memory that may be incorrect: weren’t there two Yugoslav car companies, both with a Z in their names? Zastava and…? In addition to other eastern bloc gems like Lada and Skoda.
Edit: I’m thinking of Zaz, which was Ukrainian, not Yugoslav.