The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History

Vuic, Jason

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9781400165964: The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History

ISBN 10: 1400165962 ISBN 13: 9781400165964

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2010

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends.

Hardly.

The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and it is one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand "good" communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you've got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia's nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo...at the bottom.

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About the Author:

Jason Vuic is the author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History and The Sarajevo Olympics: A History of the 1984 Winter Games. A lifelong Buccaneer fan with degrees from Wake Forest University, the University of Richmond, and Indiana University, he now lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Yugo Girls!

Q: How do you double the value of your Yugo?

A: Fill the gas tank.

The original idea to sell the Yugo in America came from California entrepreneur Miroslav Kefurt, who in March 1984 imported three Yugo 45s for display at the Los Angeles AutoExpo. Slight of build yet long in personality, Kefurt was a character. He had come to Los Angeles in 1969 from Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he and his father sold used cars. The Kefurts specialized in one model, the Fiat 600, which they sold in one color: red. "It wasn’t that Czech car buyers were demanding red Fiat 600s," remembers Kefurt, "it was because private car dealing was illegal." Technically, Czech citizens could sell their cars only after their odometers had reached 5,000 kilometers. But buying and selling used cars in quantity, as a business, was against the law. Thus, there were no used car lots in communist Czechoslovakia. Buyers simply found their cars through word of mouth or ordered new cars directly from Czechoslovakia’s two main auto producers, Skoda and Tatra.

However, like all Soviet bloc countries, Czechoslovakia had government waiting lists for new cars. To buy a Tatra 613, for instance, car buyers paid full price in advance, then waited six months to a year for delivery. The buyer had no say over the car’s color or interior, and received no warranty of any kind. "That was one of the flaws of a communist country," states Kefurt. "Somebody in the government would make a decision of how much of anything could be exported, imported, manufactured, or sold . . . It was the same thing with cars. The government didn’t make enough new cars, so a black market developed for used ones . . . But since it was illegal for people to deal in used cars as a business, my father had to be careful. That’s why he bought the same make and model [the Fiat 600] over and over, then drove the cars for five thousand kilometers before selling them at a profit. Nobody could tell these were all different cars. It was good business."

Kefurt’s father was a tour guide by profession, which meant he could acquire new Fiat 600s during business trips to northern Italy. He would buy a car, drive it back to Czechoslovakia, then bribe a guard at the border. "Bribes always worked in those days," remembers Kefurt. "You could bribe anyone for anything." His father bought three or four Fiats per year, and each family member had a Fiat registered to them. The goal was to put 5,000 kilometers on each car, a daunting task for the Kefurts, considering the poor roads and lack of interstates in Czechoslovakia. In 1967, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that Czechoslovakia had 46,000 kilometers of roads, of which only 10,000 kilometers were paved. By contrast, the United States had over 3 million kilometers of roads, of which 1 million were paved. That was when Kefurt’s father had an idea. He and his son would race their Fiats in local road rallies to burn the 5,000 kilometers.

Kefurt began racing at age fourteen; at sixteen, he placed in one of Czechoslovakia’s main road rallies and was well on his way to becoming a professional driver. But in 1969 Kefurt decided to leave Czechoslovakia to live with an uncle in the United States. Through various family connections he secured an exit visa and began working at his uncle’s restaurant in West Hollywood, California. Kefurt arrived in the United States in 1969, the same year as Woodstock, the launching of Apollo 10, and the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam. As a student at Hollywood High he found most of his friends owned muscle cars: Pontiac Firebirds and Plymouth Barracudas. They were a far cry from Kefurt’s Fiat 600.

One day while walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, Kefurt passed a Honda motorcycle dealership, which had just displayed the company’s first-ever imported automobile in its showroom window, a tiny two-door sedan known as the 600. By almost any mea sure, the Honda 600 was a midget. At a length of 125 inches, the 600 was nearly three feet shorter than the Volkswagen Beetle. At 1,355 pounds, it also weighed 500 pounds less than the Beetle. In addition, the Honda 600 had a four-speed manual transmission, a unibody steel construction, and reached a top speed of 80 miles per hour. The price: $1,275. Kefurt was in love. "Compared to the Fiat 600," he states, "the Honda 600 was a rocket."

Like many small-car enthusiasts, Kefurt favored the 600’s handling to that of larger and more powerful muscle cars. He eventually bought other 600s and opened a business fixing the cars for Hollywood-area owners. Though Honda stopped selling the 600 in 1972, in the early 1980s Kefurt discovered that people were willing to spend thousands of dollars to restore their tiny 600s. The car had a real following, so much so that Kefurt developed a profitable Honda 600 business and was known locally as a small-car guru. He drove and tested not only Hondas but also any other small car he could find. In 1982 Kefurt read that socialist Yugoslavia was producing a new two-door hatchback based on the Fiat 127 and with a 903cc, 45-horsepower engine.

Known as the Yugo 45, the car was cheap (by American standards) and, in Kefurt’s words, "an import opportunity just waiting to happen." The Yugoslavs planned to export the car to Great Britain in mid-1983 but had no such plans for the United States. Therefore, in the summer of 1982 Kefurt hopped into his Honda 600 and drove to the Yugoslav consulate in San Francisco. At the time, socialist Yugoslavia had consulates in California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, as well as a sprawling embassy complex in Washington, D.C. In San Francisco, Kefurt met with an official commercial attach� who assisted him in contacting the Yugoslav auto manufacturer Crvena Zastava, the maker of the Yugo 45. Located ninety minutes south of Belgrade in Kragujevac, Serbia, Crvena Zastava had been established in 1953 in a failing armaments plant in the city center.

The name Crvena Zastava means Red Flag in Serbo-Croatian, as in the red flag of communism. In later years the Yugo 45 would send up a different red flag among Western consumers. According to economic historian Michael Palairet, the car "was badly built, like all Zastava’s cars, and bottlenecks of every kind limited output." Although in 1962 Zastava teamed with Italian car manufacturer Fiat to build a new $30 million factory on the outskirts of Kragujevac, by the 1980s its facilities were outdated. According to one observer, "By US, Japanese and Western European standards, the Zastava works are a throwback to the Dark Ages—a Diego Rivera mural choreographed live. Noisy, smoky, and in many places poorly lit, the facilities teem with workers . . . OSHA [the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration] would have a field day here." Zastava also lacked many of the production standards then common in the West, which was the direct result of being the only true car manufacturer in a protected market.

Kefurt had never been to Kragujevac. He also had no experience with Zastava’s low-quality motorcars. But he knew that the Yugo 45 was essentially a Fiat, a car sold in the United States in one form or another since 1957. Even though Fiat had announced that because of poor sales it was leaving the American market, Kefurt believed that he could "keep" Fiat in the United States by importing the Yugo. For that, however, he needed a license, so with the help of the Yugoslav commercial attach� in San Francisco, in 1982 Kefurt sent a telex to Yugoslavia’s state-run export company Genex. Short for General Export, Genex was socialist Yugoslavia’s main trading house, whose job it was to sell consumer goods and other commodities for over 1,200 domestic firms. In 1982, Genex did $4 billion in business. The company had offices in some seventy countries and in 1986 introduced McDonald’s to Yugoslavia.

Genex put Kefurt in touch with Zastava, but officials there were skeptical that consumers in the United States would buy Yugos. Remembers Kefurt, "They told me that Americans wanted V-8s, that Americans wanted air-conditioning and automatics and that Zastava just didn’t make them." Nevertheless, Kefurt was determined. He pestered Zastava until late 1983, when the company awarded him Yugo 45 distribution rights for the state of California. There were no contracts, no negotiations, and no paperwork. In fact, Kefurt’s Yugo license, if it could be called a license, was a one-page telex. It stated that beginning with the 1985 model year, Zastava would provide Kefurt with five thousand cars annually. The telex said nothing of price. What is more, Zastava offered no guarantees and demanded that Kefurt pay for each car up front.

License in hand, in November 1983 Kefurt ordered three Yugo 45s from Kragujevac. They cost a grand total of $7,200 and were shipped to Los Angeles in a forty-foot container that arrived in March 1984. Kefurt was beside himself. He’d spent less than ten grand and was now owner, president, and CEO of YugoCars, Inc., the official distributor of Yugo 45 automobiles from Yugoslavia. Kefurt knew it was a long shot, that most Americans wanted V-8s, and air-conditioning, and automatic transmissions. But timing was on his side. Just two months earlier Yugoslavia had hosted the XIV Winter Olympiad in Sarajevo and ABC had given the Games over sixty-three hours of television coverage. There were Sarajevo placemats at McDonald’s, Sarajevo postage stamps from the U.S. Postal Service, even a thermos and bowl set from Campbell’s, the "official soups" of the 1984 Winter Olympics.

Night after night, reporters praised Yugoslavia for its efficiency. The Yugoslavs have done "every thing capitalists say socialists can’t do," exclaimed one. Buses "run frequently and on time . . . Messages are delivered quickly . . . [and arriving American journalists are] whisked to their village, assigned porters, and shown to [their] rooms . . . Skept...

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