http://www.vanityfair.com/online/dai...n-history.html

 

This ought to be an interesting read.

 

what happened with Yugos was that we paid $10k for them so you guys can have them at $4.5k ;-). Ah the beauty of socialism.

 

As I have mentioned in other threads, the Yugo GV, the model that we got here in the U.S., was basically a 15-year-old Fiat 128 design that was built under license. Production continued until the Yugo plant at Kragujevac was destroyed in 1999, during the Yugoslav war, though, by then, the car had been a failure in the U.S. and had left.

I agree that there was little, if any, reason to buy this car other than a rock-bottom price. It ranked down along with East German Trabants and other entry-level Communist-Bloc cars.

 

I had a friend from high school who had one of these (two, actually - one that he drove, one for parts).

Extremely BASIC transportation!

 

production in Kragujevac never really stopped, they fixed it and continued... but cars were very old and they could not sell them in ex-yugoslavia anymore so they lost 99% of their actual market.

plant has been acquired by fiat recently and they are producing old Fiat Puntos now and will be producing new cheap Fiat model in the future.

 

True, but the plant was heavily damaged in the Serbian war, and, as you note, had to have extensive repairs. fOR AWHILE, it was definitely not buisness as usual.


That's not surprising. The old Yugo GVs manufactured there were really outdated Fiat designs, built under license, to begin with, so Fiat was (probably) already aware of what the plant needed in terms of re-tooling.

 

Its probably a bad book about the worst car in history. Most cars, especially the Yugo, dont deserve book on their creations

 

Three things.

First, have you read it? Only after you have read it can you say, in your opinion, if it is a bad book or not.

Second, As bad a car as the Yugo was, I wouldn't call it the worst car in history. I've seen worse (and I've been around long enough to have seen worse).

Third, in the 1960's, it was a book by Ralph Nader called "Unsafe at any Speed", about a poorly-designed car (the Chevrolet Corvair), and the state of the auto industry in general, that led to big changes in the design/construction of cars and many of the improvements we now see in our modern vehicles.

 

Mike I'm curious to read it to expand my knowledge. I'm sure there are some funny tidbits