Why This 25-Mile Yugo Is More Important Than Most Low-Mileage Supercars

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The Yugo was an extremely cheap three-door hatchback produced by Zastava, a Yugoslavian manufacturer that originally made guns then licence-built Fiats.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