May 9, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, six months after its introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punchline; within a year, it had become a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR’s Car Talk declared it “the worst car of the millennium.” For most Americans, that’s where the story ends. Jason Vuic, author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, tells the rest.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple podcast, or wherever you get
your podcasts. In nineteen eighty five, Americans beginning to become
acquainted with CDs. Super Mario Brothers in a car from
(00:34):
communist Yugoslavia, imported by an eccentric entrepreneur with a desire
to do what men like Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche
had done before him, fell a cheap everyman car to
the masses. The car would go on to be considered
one of the worst ever released. Here to tell the
(00:54):
story of the Yugo is Jason Vwick, author of The Hugo,
The Rise and Fall of the worst Car in History.
Take it Away, Jason.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Introducing the New Yugo, a paramount engineering achievement from Yugoslavia.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So, in short, I don't think it was the worst
car ever made. Now, with that being said, I'm not
defending it. It was not a good car. It was
poorly built, cheaply built, cheap parts, dirty, it was allowed,
(01:33):
It didn't even have a glove box. It didn't have
a radio, You couldn't move, you couldn't move the steering
wheel up and down to fit the way.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
You said.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Sorry, Charlie, it was just you got what you got.
It was a moped with four wheels in what American
culture kind of required with status and quality, and the
Yugo had no status, and the Yugo had very little quality,
and so the Yugo became known as the worst car
ever sold history, in America or elsewhere. The Yugos story
(02:06):
really is a meeting of two different things, Communist Yugoslavia
and Malcolm Brooklyn. Brooklyn was from Philadelphia. Originally I think
he was a Jewish kid from Philadelphia. Then his father
moved to Florida. He went to high school, I believe,
in Orlando, and attended University of Florida for a little
(02:28):
bit before quitting to start businesses. You know, he didn't
drop out because you know, he couldn't do the work.
He certainly could. He just he had places to go,
and sitting in a biology class wasn't going to get
him there.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
That's the way he saw it.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
He was an idea, man, I've got an idea, let's go.
Brooklyn was what business school professors have studied him and
called him a serial entrepreneur. There's actually a term serial entrepreneurship,
and that's selling a business, starting a business, selling a business,
you know, going bank, starting another business, but perpetually starting businesses.
(03:04):
And Bricklan came out of the era of the nineteen
sixties in which franchises were king. You know, every small
town in America. If you were the first one in
with a McDonald's, you suddenly became wealthy. You know, you
got the next McDonald's in your territory, in the next McDonald's.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
And that's how Bricklin saw the world.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
He tried to take his father's handyman hardware stores and
franchise it. He had a rented Rolls Royce and he
had scooters in the trunk and he would pull up
at in the sixties, he would pull up at you know,
small gas stations and try to sell them a scooter
franchise to get you know, young people to buy mopeds
(03:43):
at these garages and auto body shops, that kind of stuff.
He then tried to import jukeboxes that played little films
at your table in you know the you know, when
you're out eating at a restaurant. Then he moved on
from Italian scooters to Japanese scooters from Fuji Heavy Industries,
and that led to Subru.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
That was the company that made Subaru.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So he brought over the first Subarus and started a
dealer network. You know, he got investors, he got dealers
that wanted in. And this was the early days of
Toyota and.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Honda in America.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Subru was another brand, and so that was what floated
his boat.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
He was a wheeler dealer.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
He was a talker, a great talker, a great presenter.
He was magnetic. People who knew him were always blown
away at his presentations, blown away at his personal how
vivacious he was and full of energy and life, and
how committed he was to new projects and ideas. He
(04:45):
would have been great for Silicon Valley and pets dot
Com or something like that. You know, he would have
run with it and gotten people excited. He used to
give presentations for Subaru, and it was when it first
came over. It was Subaru, and he would get the
dealers to stand up and go one two, Sube Barru,
and they would cheer and yell and jump up and
down and get people excited.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
To sell.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
But when things went south, he never really turned out
to be a particularly good administrator, a good manager of businesses.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
He didn't manage his money well.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
And his response to when things would go south was
to try to find more investors and when that failed
to just ghost the entire endeavor, try to sell out
or get out, go bankrupt, and move on to another project.
And so that is how Malcolm Bricklin eventually came to
the Yugo. He went from jukeboxes to scooters, from Italy
(05:43):
to Japan to Subaru.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
Subru started to tank.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
A new family came in and took control of the
company if Malcolm would leave, which led him then to
kind of a kit car called the Bricklyn SB one,
this fiberglass body, gold wing door sports car which he
named after himself, the Brickln. That was a major failure,
but it was exciting. He promoted soul singers. I read somewhere,
(06:08):
and then he got back into cars with the Brittonian,
the Penanfreina Spider, and when that started to go south,
he needed a car desperately, and this is like in
nineteen eighty four early nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
In the car he found was the ug.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I mean he and his boys, his car guys were
walking down a London street.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
They were trying to.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Purchase or a choir Aston, these little mini cars, and
that didn't work. And as they were walking down to
London street the story as one of his car guys
saw this little Fiat looking car and it had had
the mark on it jugo. And the guy said jugo,
what does this mean? Well, jay is why in Serbo
(06:56):
Croatan language, So it was a you go and and
men said, well, this is a Fiat. You know, we
know how to do fiats. I've sold fiats before. You know,
we can certainly.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Work with this car. Who makes it?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And how much is it? You know, we need a car.
We're going to go bankrupt our importation firm. And so
Brooklyn was then onto his who knows how many businesses
in he's probably forty years old, and he becomes a
car importer of.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The you Go.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
When we come back. More of this story here on
our American Stories Folks, if you love the great American
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(07:45):
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help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to Our American
(08:11):
Stories and the Story of the Hugo with Jason Viewick,
author of The Hugo, The Rise and Fall of the
Worst Car in History. When we last left off, Jason
was telling us about Malcolm Bricklin, the serial entrepreneur who
dabbled in everything from promoting soul bands to being the
first person to import Subrus to America. After being pushed
(08:35):
out of subru and working on several other projects, Malcolm
needed a new car to avoid bankruptcy. The car he
found was the Hugo, a car from Communist Yugoslavia. Let's
continue with the story. Here again is Jason Viewick.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
To understand the Ugo, you also have to understand Communist Udislavia.
During World War Two, Yugoslavia had been a kingdom and
it was invaded really from all sides by the Italians
by the Germans, Romania took a piece the Bulgarians. Yugoslavia
was ripped apart and not only was invaded, but went
(09:13):
into a civil war, Serbs and Croats and Muslims and
others killing each other violently.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
And in the middle of all.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
This, Tito Joseph braz he was a communist organizer, had
this wild life. He fought in World War One and
became a Bolshevik and a pow camp deep in Russia
and came home and worked underground through the thirties. And
when World War Two started he was head of the
Communist Party. You know, had maybe two thousand secret clandestine members,
(09:41):
mostly students in the country. And as the war became
more and more violent, the civil war became more and
more violent, he was the only one saying, you know,
we're pro yugoslav Yugoslavia means land of the Southern slavs
Ugo means south, and so he was the only one
saying Serbs in Croa. You know, he himself, he was
a half crowat half Slovenian. You know, one of his
(10:04):
right hand men was Serbian. Some of his military leaders
were Serbian. He had an advisor who was Jewish, and
he said, join us, join me, we will fight the oppressor,
we will stop fighting the civil war, and we will
liberate the country. And by the end of the war
he had liberated, largely on his own, whole swaths of Yugoslavia,
and the country was freed not really by the Soviets
(10:28):
or by the Americans, but by a local communist leader
who was wildly popular. I mean, there were people that
didn't like him, and certainly his rivals were either killed
or fled, but Tito had liberated Yugoslavia. He was a
war hero along the lines of Fdr.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
In Churchill.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
In Stalin, I mean, he really kind of was that
larger than life figure, this very popular figure, even in
the United States. And in nineteen forty eight, Stalin was
taking over taking over Eastern Europe and was trying to
take control of Yugoslavia, and Tito broke away, and so
(11:08):
immediately the United States and the West began sending Yugoslavia
arms and buying its goods and giving it loans. We
gave it Most Favored Nation status. And so though we
were rapidly anti communists in the United States, if you
picked up a paper in the fifties, Tito was a
maverick or a good communist, right, We were very cynical
about that. He wasn't Soviet. So fine, he's a communist,
(11:30):
but there's a developing country. Let him do what he wants.
And that was very very important to us, and so
Tito had to kind of skate down the middle.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
During the Cold War.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
He would buy oil and coal and whatever raw materials
from the Soviets for his factories and then sell finished
goods to the West. So he was playing both sides.
Getting back to the Yugo. Yugoslavia was massively in debt.
(12:04):
They lived way beyond their means. Tito dyes in nineteen
eighty and people are wondering, in nineteen eighty will the
Soviets invade? Will there be another civil war? People are wondering,
you know, what's going to happen. The country was getting
poorer and poorer. Debts were coming due, and so the
Yugoslavs were desperately looking for ways to sell their natural resources,
(12:26):
to sell their products, anything and everything they could sell
they wanted to sell, and our State Department helped them.
That was what our embassy largely did in the eighties
tried to get American companies to shake hands with Yugoslav companies,
now chemical and Westinghouse working in the region, and so
(12:46):
one company there called Zastava. It means red Flag, as
in the red flag of communism.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
It was a.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Arms manufacturer, metals manufacturer.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
It was a big conglomerate.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
It did a lot of different things, and it also
began producing military vehicles and that turned into consumer cars Fiats.
These weren't bad cars. They were certainly the best of
the East European cars, which isn't saying much. You're not
winning a gold medal there, but it was still better
to own a Yugo than a Lada or a Trebont.
Trabants were terrible, and the Yugo was a Fiat, and
(13:20):
so eventually they had produced millions of cars. About a
million Yugos were produced in Kragoyevat's a town a couple
hours south of Belgrade, not that far kind of a Youngstown, Ohio,
a ruddy industrial town, and that's where Bricklan went to
negotiate bringing the Yugo to the United States. Bricklan was
(13:45):
simply looking for a new product. He was kind of
down on his luck and re emerged in the early
eighties with the Pininfarina and Bertoni cars. They were fiats,
They were nice little cars, but they were fairly expensive,
and they'd already been sold in America and had done well.
And his CFO, Ira Edelson, his accounting guy, came to
(14:10):
him and said, Malcolm, if we don't have a new car,
and I think it was like sixty days or ninety
days or several months whatever, if we don't find a
new car, a new product that these dealers can sell,
we will go bankrupt.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
So this is like eighty three eighty four.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And so the story is they begin scouring the world.
That's he and his inner circle of car guys. They
were scouring the world looking for cars. The one story
is they tried to get Jaguar. Jaguar wasn't going to
sell to Brooklyn. They were trying to get the Aston
They were looking all over the place. When they saw
this Ugo in London on the street. They looked it
(14:46):
up and they contacted the Yugoslavs and set up a meeting.
They go over to Belgrade, they fly over. They've let
the American government know they're interested in this Yugo car.
They let the end, you know, and they've hired Lawrence Egelberger.
He later he became Secretary of State. He was an
ambassador to Yugoslavia that was really liked by the Yugoslavs.
(15:10):
He worked for Kissinger Associates, Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, and
companies would hire Kissinger to give them entree around.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
The world at the highest levels.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So once they hired Laurence Eigelberger, doors at the American
Embassy opened. Egoburger was no longer in government service at
that time, and also doors at the Yugoslav government opened.
He knew everyone, and he sat on Yugo America's board,
so he went in guns blazing. So they get over
(15:44):
there to look at this new car, this Yugo. It's
not new, it was first started in the eighties, but
it was new to Brooklyn. And so they stay, i believe,
at the Intercontinental in Belgrade at the hotel, and some
workers from the Zas to a factory drive these Yugos
up to Malcolm Bricklin and park them in the parking
(16:06):
lot of the Intercontinental, and he and his assistant, a
man named Tony Simoneia, a car guy who had worked
with Fiats. They start to look at the car, and
Tony's really the car guy, and he opens the trunk
and he opens the hood, and he starts the car
and drives it around and he's like, yeah, this is
a Fiat. You know, it's a simple Fiat.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
I could work with this.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
But he opens the trunk and he sees rust in
the paint. He sees rust in the paint of a
new car. It didn't mean that the metal was falling apart.
It meant that microscopic particles of metal was getting into
the paint.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Their quality control was terrible.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
They were just grinding metal inside a giant factory. Metal
would get in the air and it would get into
the paint in a different part of the factory, which
was completely different than the way the Americans did things.
You know, you could probably eat off the floor to
have surgery in a room where they paint American cars,
not the UGO. And so Tony Seminara actually said to
(17:05):
Brooklyn Malcolm, this is not good. We got to get
out of here.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
This is bad. And then they went to the plant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And you're listening to author Jason Viewick, and his book
is The Ugo, The Rise and Fall of the worst
car in history. We're also getting a story of serial
entrepreneur Malcolm Brooklyn. He's got a real problem and he's
trying to solve it with what is clearly a subpar car.
(17:34):
And by the way, we're also getting a nice look
into communist Yugoslavia and its manufacturing standards. When we come
back more of this remarkable story, the story of the
Ugo and how it came to America and who brought
it here? Here on our American stories. And we returned
(18:09):
to our American stories and the story of the Ugo
with Jason Viewick, author of the Yugo, The Rise and
Fall of the Worst Car in History. When we last
left off, Malcolm Brooklin and his car guys had gone
to Yugoslavia to check out the Ugo and what they
found had astounded them. There was rust in the paint,
(18:31):
the cars were cheaply built, but Malcolm wasn't deterred from
his vision of importing the car to America. So we
went to the Hugo plant. Let's return to the story.
Here again is Jason Viewick.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
They drive a couple hours south to this gritty industrial town,
giant plant from pre World War Two, you know. The
floor was just filthy, like the filthiest autobody mecaic shop
you've ever been in, where your shoes get dirty walking
around in that dirty, dark, oily floor, and there's workers
(19:08):
standing in the muck and standing on the dirty floor
and then putting their feet into new cars to put
in you know, carpet, or to put in the seats,
or to do whatever the assembly line workers do.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
But there's no quality control. It's just filthy dirty.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
The workers, you know, are eating right next to the
assembly line. Some of them are drinking alcohol, you know, yugas,
they're smoking. This was not something you would see at Ford.
They just didn't have any understanding of quality control whatsoever.
And that was largely because there was no competition. This
(19:43):
was a singular large car company. There were a few
smaller ones in Yugoslavia. But you would order a car.
You didn't go pick out the color. You didn't have
a salesman. Salesman you know, really, in Communist theory were parasites, right,
That was another level between you and the producer, the
buyer and the producer, you know. So you would simply
go to a Zastava office in your town and say
(20:04):
you know, I'm ready to buy a car. I've saved
a little money. Six months, nine months later, a car
would appear. They'd call you and say your car's here.
And it didn't matter what the interior looked like with
the exterior.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
And you were just given a car.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
And so there were no competing offers from other companies.
You know, the buyer had no power to say I'm
not buying this, I'm going to another company. That didn't happen,
and so the Jugo's quality was just horrific compared to
American producers. And so Tony Simonia says to Malcolm, we
got to get out of here. This isn't worth it
(20:38):
this car. And he's like, look around, look at this plant.
It's old, yes, but look there's a large workforce here.
They're motivated to sell this car. What would it take
for us to build a plant to ever have this
chance that we can clean this up? Look on the
bright side, Ever, the salesman, he sold it to his
own man, his own guy who knew Fiat intimately, and
(21:02):
he won them over. There's rust in the trunk, big deal.
We'll teach them not to do this. We'll fix the
painting process. We'll fix this, and what we can't fix,
we'll bring in outside vendors and we'll bring in our
own parts. They had to kind of teach the Yugoslavs
to tighten up, and they even created a Ugo America line,
(21:23):
a you Go a line where the better workers would come,
the workers that were gold driven, you know, instead of
the average worker, you know, or the old communist joke was,
you know, then they pretend to pay us, and we
pretend to work.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
These guys really work.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And they took great pride in being the ones who
produced a better you Go. Americans laugh at that, but
the car they.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Produced was far better.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I forgot whatever the numbers were in the standards, But
the crash tests they barely passed, but they passed, I
do know, and I spoke to the guys who dealt
with the crash tests that the most important thing that
the Ugo Slash Fiat derivative had going forward in the
crash test was that the car tire was in the
hood in the front. The engine was in the front,
(22:15):
but they put the car tire in there as well,
and that car tire gave it enough bounce on their
crash test that they actually passed. Now the emissions part.
What they did is they simply got a bosh carburetor,
so that's how they did it. But there were these
really funny stories of the first Yugos being shipped over
test cars and a shipping container. There's a movie Drowning
(22:39):
Mona with Danny DeVito from the late nineties, I believe,
and the storyline was that this was a town. It
was like a murder mystery or something, a town in
New York that was a Yugo testing ground. That's not true.
That was just a funny fictional testing ground in the movie.
In real life, there were two or three cars that
(22:59):
were flown over by Yugoslava Air Transport, the yacht the
State Airplane Company. They flew over to I think LaGuardia,
and then they were driven around New Jersey by this
Tony Seminara and they are all these funny stories of
just how chinsey this car was. Once he was driving
over this old bridge, like over railroad tracks as a
(23:21):
train's going by or something in the seat just breaks
and he falls backwards into the back seat. He's totally
out of control, can't see you know. Another time he
like drove it up onto his lawn and almost wrecked,
and he made.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
A massive list.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
One of the first fax machines in communist Yugoslavia was
installed because of Yugo America. I think it was the
first fax machine ever and he sent I forget what
it was in the book, but it was like a
five meter fax. It was this giant list of hundreds
of changes that Tony had come up with. You know,
(23:57):
new screw here, knew this there that new type of
everything from the design of the fabric to the paint.
I know that Pittsburgh Paints got involved. They bought better paint.
They changed this, they changed the antenna, they changed this,
they changed that. And all of these changes had to
be made, not just emissions and not just crash, but
(24:18):
all of these changes that Tony thought were going to
be necessary to get people in the American market to
buy it. And to their credit, these Yugoslav workers did that,
you know, in spite of a culture that mitigated against creating.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
A high quality product.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yugoslav workers weren't bad workers in any way, they weren't lazy.
They could make a car. That's pretty impressive. Think of
how many countries in the world don't bother. But not
being in a competitive environment is disastrous in the industrial process.
If you build something, assemble something, produce a product that's
(24:56):
not in a competitive environment, not in a free market,
you're cruising for a bruise, and eventually your product will
be of less quality and of less value than someone
who has to make constant, perpetual improvements, which is how
the Japanese really walloped Detroit.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Detroit was monopolistic.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Detroit had its protected market and didn't think anyone else
would threaten it. As the Japanese got better and better
and better, we just didn't have the ability to respond.
But imagine the Yugoslavs, never having competed ever, now have
to send their derivative audimobile to America.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
And to their credit, they did it. They did it.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
In some ways, it was pretty impressive that a communist
country could send an automobile to America. That seems so
wildly insurmountable, but they did it, and Bricklin was the
idea man who got everyone involved to do it, so
they signed the agreements. Brooklyn I think paid two thousand
(26:00):
a car. The Yugoslavs told me he pay twenty five hundred.
Who knows, But the car was thirty nine to ninety
bare bones, and it was bare bones to American standards.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
It was very chinzy.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
But there were other people who saw it as very
very basic transportation that.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
Didn't want more than that. You know, I compare it
to a moped.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
No one ever looks in a mopad and says, oh,
that's a that's a nice moped.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
It's a moped. It's point A to point B.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
And for thirty nine to ninety, there were people who
liked that there was novelty in that you could only
find used cars at that price, and so people wanted
to see what was going on. The automotive press went
crazy over Brickland. They went crazy over a communist car
in Reagan's America. People began lining up at dealerships. They
(26:48):
were selling like hotcakes. Some dealerships sold two hundred in
a day. And a lot of people love this car.
But when it was finally reviewed in early nineteen eighty
six by consumer reports, and this really is the clear nosedive.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
And you've been listening to Jason Viewick, author of the UGO,
The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History,
What happens next? Stay tuned After these commercial messages here
on our American story, and we returned to our American
(27:39):
stories and the final portion of our story on the
Ugo with Jason Viewick, author of the Hugo, The Rise
and Fall of the worst car in history. When we
last left off, Malcolm Brickland had successfully signed a deal
with communist Yugo Slavia to import the Yugo, despite serious
concerns on just about everything from the windshield wipers to
(28:03):
the steering wheel. Nevertheless, they pressed forward and released the
car to widespread height until Consumer Reports released they're all
important review of the car. Let's return to the story
here again is Jason Fewick.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
The Yugo ascended and in early nineteen eighty six, and
I actually tracked down and I found the man who
reviewed the car for Consumer Reports. I just cold called
him out of the phone book. He was retired, very
nice man. And Consumer Reports to this day they test everything,
and in those days they had a lot of money,
They had millions of subscribers, so they would test mattresses
(28:43):
by dropping. I had a machine that would hit a
mattress with a bowling ball ten thousand times to see.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
What it would do to your side of the bed.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
They would test washing machines, washing clothes twenty four hours
a day, seven days a week, for a month to
see how they did. You know, they would review anything
and everything. And Consumer Reports was so powerful in those days.
So if they reviewed something like a keyboard or a typewriter,
or a hater or you know, a garage door opener,
(29:11):
and they said it wasn't good, that company could go bankrupt,
that product would disappear from the shelves, They would discontinue
the line because people read it. And so when they
reviewed the Ugo, you know, and when I spoke to
the to the man who literally did the testing, and
(29:32):
everything was done privately. I just happened to find the
guy who did it. He said, it wasn't a bad car.
It was a Fiat. It was just an old, simple Fiat.
This new Yugo was a dated automobile. And so my
question was was it better to buy a new Yugo
or a good used car? And Consumer Reports said, well,
(29:55):
you know, if you've got four grand to spend, you
probably want to buy if you can, and a four
or five year old Honda, buy an old super Ru,
but you really don't want to buy this new car.
And one of the questions was, will there be a
dealer network.
Speaker 4 (30:12):
To service you?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
What happens if this if this company goes bankrupt, you're
going to be orphaned. They call it being orphaned by
a company. You're going to be abandoned. What happens if
you're not good at fixing cars yourself? This isn't rocket science,
This wasn't a bad.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Car to fix.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
It didn't have computers on board, and you know, you
didn't need an engineering degree. But if you don't know
how to fix this car, it's probably better to buy
a used car. When Consumer Reports said that the Ugo
mania when the car first came out was so crazy
that I think the press kind of enjoyed. You know, uh,
(30:49):
you know, the car that people lined up for nine
months ago is now being panned by Consumer reports. That
was national news that alone. It collapsed, sales collapse apsed.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Suddenly.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
David Letterman is saying that other comedians, and it gets
into our pop culture. Once you get Letterman, you get
TV shows. I know that Moonlighting, the show with Sybil
Shepherd and Bruce willis the one that launched Bruce Willis's career.
There's an episode where he wrecks several company cars. I
(31:21):
think a BMW and kind of as a joke, Sybil
Shepherd is love interest.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
She buys him a new you Go.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
He tries to have the car stolen, tries to wreck it,
He parks it in the worst part of La with
keys in the ignition, and the joke is no one
wanted it, and so by the end of the episode
there's a scene, it's a famous scene where.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
He drives the you Go into a grave. You Go
jokes came out.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Why does a Ugo have rear window to frosters so
it keeps your hands warm when you push it? A
girl in my school out of you Go, and I
remember guys would pick the car up and turn it
perpendicular in her parking space so she couldn't get out.
They didn't do that to someone with a Dotson or
an old beat up Ford.
Speaker 4 (32:04):
They did it to the Yugo. We thought it was funny.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Then dealerships would have one was a toy Yugo sales event.
Buy a Toyota, get a Yugo free. Why did the
Yugo rocket to infamy so quickly? There weren't that many buyers.
It sold about one hundred and twenty five thousand cars.
I don't know the number specifically. That wasn't bad, but
that was a tiny, tiny hundreds and hundreds of a
(32:29):
percentage of the American market. Over that seven or eight
or nine year period, most Americans had never seen a Yugo.
Pop culture was such the force of the jokes and
the joking really overtook the car and became, you know,
kind of common knowledge. It was a truism that the
Yugo was the worst car ever made, whether or not
(32:50):
that was true or not. And again, I'm not defending
the car. It was probably the worst car in the
American market in nineteen eighty six, but it wasn't so
bad that it deserved to be lampoon the way it was.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
It's a car.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It got in music, it got into art, it got
into everywhere. By two thousand, on Click and Clack NPR,
you know the Tappitt Brothers, that funny show that's no
longer on the air, they had a listener poll what's
the worst car of the millennium, and they voted the
you Go, and I just thought, wow, I guarantee that
(33:25):
most of these people hadn't seen a you Go ever.
But that is the way American pop culture was in
my theory, and what I argue in the book is
being a child of the eighties. I remember this was
the era of you know, you were what you wore,
designer labels, Gucci, Fendy. This was the era when rappers,
(33:48):
in young kids black and white, would rip a Cadillac
symbol off the front, a hood ornament or a Mercedes
hood ornament. You would rip it off of a car.
I never did this. You'd rip it off a car
and where on your neck. I couldn't think of something
that would say I'm more poor than stealing a hood ornament,
but that somehow meant this is what I aspire to,
this is what we valued.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
And I think the ugo was countercultural.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
I just remember that I really would have died if
my parents came home and said, we bought you a
car and it was a UGO. I really probably would
have died at sixteen years old if my parents had
done that. In any other generation, it's a car, big deal,
But in the eighties it was countercultural. It was iconic
for what you did not want.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
To be seen.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Kids would say, it's a car you don't want to
be seen dead in right, and so when you have
an entry level car that is a joke to the youth.
I think you put that all together, Bricklin salesmanship, sending
the Ugo into the stratosphere of the media, and then
also consumer reports, you know, casting it back down, plus
the youth and the culture of the eighties. The Yugo
(34:56):
was just destined to fail. And so Brooklyn's accountant, his CFO,
went to Wall Street trying to find investors, and again
he found just like it happened to Brooklyn with the
Subaru back in the late sixties. They found an investor,
a Wall Street firm. They found money and offered to
(35:19):
buy out Brooklyn, and he received several million dollars I
think it was four maybe five million dollars something. So
he made money on the Yugo, but was, you know,
immediately sued by dealers and people who claim they ripped
him off, and on and on and on, and it
probably had spent beyond his means, and he himself went bankrupt.
But Brooklyn got out I believe in eighty seven or
(35:41):
eighty eight. The car survived but was failing under new management,
and then itself went bankrupt. So you know, this ends
with a Yugoslav civil war. This ends with a country
falling apart in nineteen ninety two. Starting in nineteen ninety one,
the u Go collapses. Everything was sold, the car was
(36:04):
no more, and so the Yugo doesn't exist anymore. You
can go to Serbia today and see you Gos on
the street. They still service them, there's still people that
can fix them, there's still parts available.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
But in general, the Ugo is a very rare bird.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
I bet, I bet there's one hundred in America on
the road, maybe one hundred. I know that Florida in
the early two thousands had two or three registered Yugos
out of seventeen or eighteen million cars, So you know,
it'd be hard pressed to find a Yugo. So you know,
(36:40):
that's kind of the Yugo story in a nutshell, you know,
the rise and fall and the creation of us of
an American icon.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Right. I can't think of a greater icon for failure.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Now that the generation that knew the Edseil, which had
a different reason for failing, wasn't that bad of a car.
Once that generation is gone, the you go, our ed sold.
The Yugo is our great failure. I don't really know
anything else of a product clear coke, maybe laser discs,
maybe or is a failure, But I don't know anything
(37:13):
at that level of failure for a product. Maybe Enron,
you know, maybe some other failures in the Internet, but
nothing for a product has even approached the Ugo in
terms of its It's you know how much it's been
lampooned and taken to heart by the American populace as
one of the worst products ever sold. It wasn't a
(37:35):
good product, but it wasn't as bad as people said,
and it probably was a decent deal at thirty nine
to ninety to tell you the truth.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
It got you where you need it to go. But
that wasn't enough.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
That wasn't enough for American culture of the eighties and
and for Americans even today.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
And a terrific job on the editing, storytelling and production
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
Jason Viewick, author of the Yugo, The Rise and Fall
of the Worst Car in History. It's available wherever you
buy your books. The Story of the Hugo, The Story
of the Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.
(38:12):
Here on our American stories,
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple podcast, or wherever you get
your podcasts. In nineteen eighty five, Americans beginning to become
acquainted with CDs. Super Mario Brothers in a car from
(00:34):
communist Yugoslavia, imported by an eccentric entrepreneur with a desire
to do what men like Henry Ford and Ferdinand Porsche
had done before him, fell a cheap everyman car to
the masses. The car would go on to be considered
one of the worst ever released. Here to tell the
(00:54):
story of the Yugo is Jason Vwick, author of The Hugo,
The Rise and Fall of the worst Car in History.
Take it Away, Jason.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Introducing the New Yugo, a paramount engineering achievement from Yugoslavia.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
So, in short, I don't think it was the worst
car ever made. Now, with that being said, I'm not
defending it. It was not a good car. It was
poorly built, cheaply built, cheap parts, dirty, it was allowed,
(01:33):
It didn't even have a glove box. It didn't have
a radio, You couldn't move, you couldn't move the steering
wheel up and down to fit the way.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
You said.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Sorry, Charlie, it was just you got what you got.
It was a moped with four wheels in what American
culture kind of required with status and quality, and the
Yugo had no status, and the Yugo had very little quality,
and so the Yugo became known as the worst car
ever sold history, in America or elsewhere. The Yugos story
(02:06):
really is a meeting of two different things, Communist Yugoslavia
and Malcolm Brooklyn. Brooklyn was from Philadelphia. Originally I think
he was a Jewish kid from Philadelphia. Then his father
moved to Florida. He went to high school, I believe,
in Orlando, and attended University of Florida for a little
(02:28):
bit before quitting to start businesses. You know, he didn't
drop out because you know, he couldn't do the work.
He certainly could. He just he had places to go,
and sitting in a biology class wasn't going to get
him there.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
That's the way he saw it.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
He was an idea, man, I've got an idea, let's go.
Brooklyn was what business school professors have studied him and
called him a serial entrepreneur. There's actually a term serial entrepreneurship,
and that's selling a business, starting a business, selling a business,
you know, going bank, starting another business, but perpetually starting businesses.
(03:04):
And Bricklan came out of the era of the nineteen
sixties in which franchises were king. You know, every small
town in America. If you were the first one in
with a McDonald's, you suddenly became wealthy. You know, you
got the next McDonald's in your territory, in the next McDonald's.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
And that's how Bricklin saw the world.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
He tried to take his father's handyman hardware stores and
franchise it. He had a rented Rolls Royce and he
had scooters in the trunk and he would pull up
at in the sixties, he would pull up at you know,
small gas stations and try to sell them a scooter
franchise to get you know, young people to buy mopeds
(03:43):
at these garages and auto body shops, that kind of stuff.
He then tried to import jukeboxes that played little films
at your table in you know the you know, when
you're out eating at a restaurant. Then he moved on
from Italian scooters to Japanese scooters from Fuji Heavy Industries,
and that led to Subru.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
That was the company that made Subaru.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So he brought over the first Subarus and started a
dealer network. You know, he got investors, he got dealers
that wanted in. And this was the early days of
Toyota and.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Honda in America.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Subru was another brand, and so that was what floated
his boat.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
He was a wheeler dealer.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
He was a talker, a great talker, a great presenter.
He was magnetic. People who knew him were always blown
away at his presentations, blown away at his personal how
vivacious he was and full of energy and life, and
how committed he was to new projects and ideas. He
(04:45):
would have been great for Silicon Valley and pets dot
Com or something like that. You know, he would have
run with it and gotten people excited. He used to
give presentations for Subaru, and it was when it first
came over. It was Subaru, and he would get the
dealers to stand up and go one two, Sube Barru,
and they would cheer and yell and jump up and
down and get people excited.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
To sell.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
But when things went south, he never really turned out
to be a particularly good administrator, a good manager of businesses.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
He didn't manage his money well.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
And his response to when things would go south was
to try to find more investors and when that failed
to just ghost the entire endeavor, try to sell out
or get out, go bankrupt, and move on to another project.
And so that is how Malcolm Bricklin eventually came to
the Yugo. He went from jukeboxes to scooters, from Italy
(05:43):
to Japan to Subaru.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
Subru started to tank.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
A new family came in and took control of the
company if Malcolm would leave, which led him then to
kind of a kit car called the Bricklyn SB one,
this fiberglass body, gold wing door sports car which he
named after himself, the Brickln. That was a major failure,
but it was exciting. He promoted soul singers. I read somewhere,
(06:08):
and then he got back into cars with the Brittonian,
the Penanfreina Spider, and when that started to go south,
he needed a car desperately, and this is like in
nineteen eighty four early nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
In the car he found was the ug.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I mean he and his boys, his car guys were
walking down a London street.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
They were trying to.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Purchase or a choir Aston, these little mini cars, and
that didn't work. And as they were walking down to
London street the story as one of his car guys
saw this little Fiat looking car and it had had
the mark on it jugo. And the guy said jugo,
what does this mean? Well, jay is why in Serbo
(06:56):
Croatan language, So it was a you go and and
men said, well, this is a Fiat. You know, we
know how to do fiats. I've sold fiats before. You know,
we can certainly.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Work with this car. Who makes it?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And how much is it? You know, we need a car.
We're going to go bankrupt our importation firm. And so
Brooklyn was then onto his who knows how many businesses
in he's probably forty years old, and he becomes a
car importer of.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The you Go.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
When we come back. More of this story here on
our American Stories Folks, if you love the great American
stories we tell and love America like we do, we're
asking you to become a part of the our American
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(07:45):
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help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to Our American
(08:11):
Stories and the Story of the Hugo with Jason Viewick,
author of The Hugo, The Rise and Fall of the
Worst Car in History. When we last left off, Jason
was telling us about Malcolm Bricklin, the serial entrepreneur who
dabbled in everything from promoting soul bands to being the
first person to import Subrus to America. After being pushed
(08:35):
out of subru and working on several other projects, Malcolm
needed a new car to avoid bankruptcy. The car he
found was the Hugo, a car from Communist Yugoslavia. Let's
continue with the story. Here again is Jason Viewick.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
To understand the Ugo, you also have to understand Communist Udislavia.
During World War Two, Yugoslavia had been a kingdom and
it was invaded really from all sides by the Italians
by the Germans, Romania took a piece the Bulgarians. Yugoslavia
was ripped apart and not only was invaded, but went
(09:13):
into a civil war, Serbs and Croats and Muslims and
others killing each other violently.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
And in the middle of all.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
This, Tito Joseph braz he was a communist organizer, had
this wild life. He fought in World War One and
became a Bolshevik and a pow camp deep in Russia
and came home and worked underground through the thirties. And
when World War Two started he was head of the
Communist Party. You know, had maybe two thousand secret clandestine members,
(09:41):
mostly students in the country. And as the war became
more and more violent, the civil war became more and
more violent, he was the only one saying, you know,
we're pro yugoslav Yugoslavia means land of the Southern slavs
Ugo means south, and so he was the only one
saying Serbs in Croa. You know, he himself, he was
a half crowat half Slovenian. You know, one of his
(10:04):
right hand men was Serbian. Some of his military leaders
were Serbian. He had an advisor who was Jewish, and
he said, join us, join me, we will fight the oppressor,
we will stop fighting the civil war, and we will
liberate the country. And by the end of the war
he had liberated, largely on his own, whole swaths of Yugoslavia,
and the country was freed not really by the Soviets
(10:28):
or by the Americans, but by a local communist leader
who was wildly popular. I mean, there were people that
didn't like him, and certainly his rivals were either killed
or fled, but Tito had liberated Yugoslavia. He was a
war hero along the lines of Fdr.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
In Churchill.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
In Stalin, I mean, he really kind of was that
larger than life figure, this very popular figure, even in
the United States. And in nineteen forty eight, Stalin was
taking over taking over Eastern Europe and was trying to
take control of Yugoslavia, and Tito broke away, and so
(11:08):
immediately the United States and the West began sending Yugoslavia
arms and buying its goods and giving it loans. We
gave it Most Favored Nation status. And so though we
were rapidly anti communists in the United States, if you
picked up a paper in the fifties, Tito was a
maverick or a good communist, right, We were very cynical
about that. He wasn't Soviet. So fine, he's a communist,
(11:30):
but there's a developing country. Let him do what he wants.
And that was very very important to us, and so
Tito had to kind of skate down the middle.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
During the Cold War.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
He would buy oil and coal and whatever raw materials
from the Soviets for his factories and then sell finished
goods to the West. So he was playing both sides.
Getting back to the Yugo. Yugoslavia was massively in debt.
(12:04):
They lived way beyond their means. Tito dyes in nineteen
eighty and people are wondering, in nineteen eighty will the
Soviets invade? Will there be another civil war? People are wondering,
you know, what's going to happen. The country was getting
poorer and poorer. Debts were coming due, and so the
Yugoslavs were desperately looking for ways to sell their natural resources,
(12:26):
to sell their products, anything and everything they could sell
they wanted to sell, and our State Department helped them.
That was what our embassy largely did in the eighties
tried to get American companies to shake hands with Yugoslav companies,
now chemical and Westinghouse working in the region, and so
(12:46):
one company there called Zastava. It means red Flag, as
in the red flag of communism.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
It was a.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Arms manufacturer, metals manufacturer.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
It was a big conglomerate.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
It did a lot of different things, and it also
began producing military vehicles and that turned into consumer cars Fiats.
These weren't bad cars. They were certainly the best of
the East European cars, which isn't saying much. You're not
winning a gold medal there, but it was still better
to own a Yugo than a Lada or a Trebont.
Trabants were terrible, and the Yugo was a Fiat, and
(13:20):
so eventually they had produced millions of cars. About a
million Yugos were produced in Kragoyevat's a town a couple
hours south of Belgrade, not that far kind of a Youngstown, Ohio,
a ruddy industrial town, and that's where Bricklan went to
negotiate bringing the Yugo to the United States. Bricklan was
(13:45):
simply looking for a new product. He was kind of
down on his luck and re emerged in the early
eighties with the Pininfarina and Bertoni cars. They were fiats,
They were nice little cars, but they were fairly expensive,
and they'd already been sold in America and had done well.
And his CFO, Ira Edelson, his accounting guy, came to
(14:10):
him and said, Malcolm, if we don't have a new car,
and I think it was like sixty days or ninety
days or several months whatever, if we don't find a
new car, a new product that these dealers can sell,
we will go bankrupt.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
So this is like eighty three eighty four.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And so the story is they begin scouring the world.
That's he and his inner circle of car guys. They
were scouring the world looking for cars. The one story
is they tried to get Jaguar. Jaguar wasn't going to
sell to Brooklyn. They were trying to get the Aston
They were looking all over the place. When they saw
this Ugo in London on the street. They looked it
(14:46):
up and they contacted the Yugoslavs and set up a meeting.
They go over to Belgrade, they fly over. They've let
the American government know they're interested in this Yugo car.
They let the end, you know, and they've hired Lawrence Egelberger.
He later he became Secretary of State. He was an
ambassador to Yugoslavia that was really liked by the Yugoslavs.
(15:10):
He worked for Kissinger Associates, Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, and
companies would hire Kissinger to give them entree around.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
The world at the highest levels.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So once they hired Laurence Eigelberger, doors at the American
Embassy opened. Egoburger was no longer in government service at
that time, and also doors at the Yugoslav government opened.
He knew everyone, and he sat on Yugo America's board,
so he went in guns blazing. So they get over
(15:44):
there to look at this new car, this Yugo. It's
not new, it was first started in the eighties, but
it was new to Brooklyn. And so they stay, i believe,
at the Intercontinental in Belgrade at the hotel, and some
workers from the Zas to a factory drive these Yugos
up to Malcolm Bricklin and park them in the parking
(16:06):
lot of the Intercontinental, and he and his assistant, a
man named Tony Simoneia, a car guy who had worked
with Fiats. They start to look at the car, and
Tony's really the car guy, and he opens the trunk
and he opens the hood, and he starts the car
and drives it around and he's like, yeah, this is
a Fiat. You know, it's a simple Fiat.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
I could work with this.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
But he opens the trunk and he sees rust in
the paint. He sees rust in the paint of a
new car. It didn't mean that the metal was falling apart.
It meant that microscopic particles of metal was getting into
the paint.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Their quality control was terrible.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
They were just grinding metal inside a giant factory. Metal
would get in the air and it would get into
the paint in a different part of the factory, which
was completely different than the way the Americans did things.
You know, you could probably eat off the floor to
have surgery in a room where they paint American cars,
not the UGO. And so Tony Seminara actually said to
(17:05):
Brooklyn Malcolm, this is not good. We got to get
out of here.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
This is bad. And then they went to the plant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And you're listening to author Jason Viewick, and his book
is The Ugo, The Rise and Fall of the worst
car in history. We're also getting a story of serial
entrepreneur Malcolm Brooklyn. He's got a real problem and he's
trying to solve it with what is clearly a subpar car.
(17:34):
And by the way, we're also getting a nice look
into communist Yugoslavia and its manufacturing standards. When we come
back more of this remarkable story, the story of the
Ugo and how it came to America and who brought
it here? Here on our American stories. And we returned
(18:09):
to our American stories and the story of the Ugo
with Jason Viewick, author of the Yugo, The Rise and
Fall of the Worst Car in History. When we last
left off, Malcolm Brooklin and his car guys had gone
to Yugoslavia to check out the Ugo and what they
found had astounded them. There was rust in the paint,
(18:31):
the cars were cheaply built, but Malcolm wasn't deterred from
his vision of importing the car to America. So we
went to the Hugo plant. Let's return to the story.
Here again is Jason Viewick.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
They drive a couple hours south to this gritty industrial town,
giant plant from pre World War Two, you know. The
floor was just filthy, like the filthiest autobody mecaic shop
you've ever been in, where your shoes get dirty walking
around in that dirty, dark, oily floor, and there's workers
(19:08):
standing in the muck and standing on the dirty floor
and then putting their feet into new cars to put
in you know, carpet, or to put in the seats,
or to do whatever the assembly line workers do.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
But there's no quality control. It's just filthy dirty.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
The workers, you know, are eating right next to the
assembly line. Some of them are drinking alcohol, you know, yugas,
they're smoking. This was not something you would see at Ford.
They just didn't have any understanding of quality control whatsoever.
And that was largely because there was no competition. This
(19:43):
was a singular large car company. There were a few
smaller ones in Yugoslavia. But you would order a car.
You didn't go pick out the color. You didn't have
a salesman. Salesman you know, really, in Communist theory were parasites, right,
That was another level between you and the producer, the
buyer and the producer, you know. So you would simply
go to a Zastava office in your town and say
(20:04):
you know, I'm ready to buy a car. I've saved
a little money. Six months, nine months later, a car
would appear. They'd call you and say your car's here.
And it didn't matter what the interior looked like with
the exterior.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
And you were just given a car.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
And so there were no competing offers from other companies.
You know, the buyer had no power to say I'm
not buying this, I'm going to another company. That didn't happen,
and so the Jugo's quality was just horrific compared to
American producers. And so Tony Simonia says to Malcolm, we
got to get out of here. This isn't worth it
(20:38):
this car. And he's like, look around, look at this plant.
It's old, yes, but look there's a large workforce here.
They're motivated to sell this car. What would it take
for us to build a plant to ever have this
chance that we can clean this up? Look on the
bright side, Ever, the salesman, he sold it to his
own man, his own guy who knew Fiat intimately, and
(21:02):
he won them over. There's rust in the trunk, big deal.
We'll teach them not to do this. We'll fix the
painting process. We'll fix this, and what we can't fix,
we'll bring in outside vendors and we'll bring in our
own parts. They had to kind of teach the Yugoslavs
to tighten up, and they even created a Ugo America line,
(21:23):
a you Go a line where the better workers would come,
the workers that were gold driven, you know, instead of
the average worker, you know, or the old communist joke was,
you know, then they pretend to pay us, and we
pretend to work.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
These guys really work.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And they took great pride in being the ones who
produced a better you Go. Americans laugh at that, but
the car they.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Produced was far better.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I forgot whatever the numbers were in the standards, But
the crash tests they barely passed, but they passed, I
do know, and I spoke to the guys who dealt
with the crash tests that the most important thing that
the Ugo Slash Fiat derivative had going forward in the
crash test was that the car tire was in the
hood in the front. The engine was in the front,
(22:15):
but they put the car tire in there as well,
and that car tire gave it enough bounce on their
crash test that they actually passed. Now the emissions part.
What they did is they simply got a bosh carburetor,
so that's how they did it. But there were these
really funny stories of the first Yugos being shipped over
test cars and a shipping container. There's a movie Drowning
(22:39):
Mona with Danny DeVito from the late nineties, I believe,
and the storyline was that this was a town. It
was like a murder mystery or something, a town in
New York that was a Yugo testing ground. That's not true.
That was just a funny fictional testing ground in the movie.
In real life, there were two or three cars that
(22:59):
were flown over by Yugoslava Air Transport, the yacht the
State Airplane Company. They flew over to I think LaGuardia,
and then they were driven around New Jersey by this
Tony Seminara and they are all these funny stories of
just how chinsey this car was. Once he was driving
over this old bridge, like over railroad tracks as a
(23:21):
train's going by or something in the seat just breaks
and he falls backwards into the back seat. He's totally
out of control, can't see you know. Another time he
like drove it up onto his lawn and almost wrecked,
and he made.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
A massive list.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
One of the first fax machines in communist Yugoslavia was
installed because of Yugo America. I think it was the
first fax machine ever and he sent I forget what
it was in the book, but it was like a
five meter fax. It was this giant list of hundreds
of changes that Tony had come up with. You know,
(23:57):
new screw here, knew this there that new type of
everything from the design of the fabric to the paint.
I know that Pittsburgh Paints got involved. They bought better paint.
They changed this, they changed the antenna, they changed this,
they changed that. And all of these changes had to
be made, not just emissions and not just crash, but
(24:18):
all of these changes that Tony thought were going to
be necessary to get people in the American market to
buy it. And to their credit, these Yugoslav workers did that,
you know, in spite of a culture that mitigated against creating.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
A high quality product.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yugoslav workers weren't bad workers in any way, they weren't lazy.
They could make a car. That's pretty impressive. Think of
how many countries in the world don't bother. But not
being in a competitive environment is disastrous in the industrial process.
If you build something, assemble something, produce a product that's
(24:56):
not in a competitive environment, not in a free market,
you're cruising for a bruise, and eventually your product will
be of less quality and of less value than someone
who has to make constant, perpetual improvements, which is how
the Japanese really walloped Detroit.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Detroit was monopolistic.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Detroit had its protected market and didn't think anyone else
would threaten it. As the Japanese got better and better
and better, we just didn't have the ability to respond.
But imagine the Yugoslavs, never having competed ever, now have
to send their derivative audimobile to America.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
And to their credit, they did it. They did it.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
In some ways, it was pretty impressive that a communist
country could send an automobile to America. That seems so
wildly insurmountable, but they did it, and Bricklin was the
idea man who got everyone involved to do it, so
they signed the agreements. Brooklyn I think paid two thousand
(26:00):
a car. The Yugoslavs told me he pay twenty five hundred.
Who knows, But the car was thirty nine to ninety
bare bones, and it was bare bones to American standards.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
It was very chinzy.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
But there were other people who saw it as very
very basic transportation that.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
Didn't want more than that. You know, I compare it
to a moped.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
No one ever looks in a mopad and says, oh,
that's a that's a nice moped.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
It's a moped. It's point A to point B.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
And for thirty nine to ninety, there were people who
liked that there was novelty in that you could only
find used cars at that price, and so people wanted
to see what was going on. The automotive press went
crazy over Brickland. They went crazy over a communist car
in Reagan's America. People began lining up at dealerships. They
(26:48):
were selling like hotcakes. Some dealerships sold two hundred in
a day. And a lot of people love this car.
But when it was finally reviewed in early nineteen eighty
six by consumer reports, and this really is the clear nosedive.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
And you've been listening to Jason Viewick, author of the UGO,
The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History,
What happens next? Stay tuned After these commercial messages here
on our American story, and we returned to our American
(27:39):
stories and the final portion of our story on the
Ugo with Jason Viewick, author of the Hugo, The Rise
and Fall of the worst car in history. When we
last left off, Malcolm Brickland had successfully signed a deal
with communist Yugo Slavia to import the Yugo, despite serious
concerns on just about everything from the windshield wipers to
(28:03):
the steering wheel. Nevertheless, they pressed forward and released the
car to widespread height until Consumer Reports released they're all
important review of the car. Let's return to the story
here again is Jason Fewick.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
The Yugo ascended and in early nineteen eighty six, and
I actually tracked down and I found the man who
reviewed the car for Consumer Reports. I just cold called
him out of the phone book. He was retired, very
nice man. And Consumer Reports to this day they test everything,
and in those days they had a lot of money,
They had millions of subscribers, so they would test mattresses
(28:43):
by dropping. I had a machine that would hit a
mattress with a bowling ball ten thousand times to see.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
What it would do to your side of the bed.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
They would test washing machines, washing clothes twenty four hours
a day, seven days a week, for a month to
see how they did. You know, they would review anything
and everything. And Consumer Reports was so powerful in those days.
So if they reviewed something like a keyboard or a typewriter,
or a hater or you know, a garage door opener,
(29:11):
and they said it wasn't good, that company could go bankrupt,
that product would disappear from the shelves, They would discontinue
the line because people read it. And so when they
reviewed the Ugo, you know, and when I spoke to
the to the man who literally did the testing, and
(29:32):
everything was done privately. I just happened to find the
guy who did it. He said, it wasn't a bad car.
It was a Fiat. It was just an old, simple Fiat.
This new Yugo was a dated automobile. And so my
question was was it better to buy a new Yugo
or a good used car? And Consumer Reports said, well,
(29:55):
you know, if you've got four grand to spend, you
probably want to buy if you can, and a four
or five year old Honda, buy an old super Ru,
but you really don't want to buy this new car.
And one of the questions was, will there be a
dealer network.
Speaker 4 (30:12):
To service you?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
What happens if this if this company goes bankrupt, you're
going to be orphaned. They call it being orphaned by
a company. You're going to be abandoned. What happens if
you're not good at fixing cars yourself? This isn't rocket science,
This wasn't a bad.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Car to fix.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
It didn't have computers on board, and you know, you
didn't need an engineering degree. But if you don't know
how to fix this car, it's probably better to buy
a used car. When Consumer Reports said that the Ugo
mania when the car first came out was so crazy
that I think the press kind of enjoyed. You know, uh,
(30:49):
you know, the car that people lined up for nine
months ago is now being panned by Consumer reports. That
was national news that alone. It collapsed, sales collapse apsed.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
Suddenly.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
David Letterman is saying that other comedians, and it gets
into our pop culture. Once you get Letterman, you get
TV shows. I know that Moonlighting, the show with Sybil
Shepherd and Bruce willis the one that launched Bruce Willis's career.
There's an episode where he wrecks several company cars. I
(31:21):
think a BMW and kind of as a joke, Sybil
Shepherd is love interest.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
She buys him a new you Go.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
He tries to have the car stolen, tries to wreck it,
He parks it in the worst part of La with
keys in the ignition, and the joke is no one
wanted it, and so by the end of the episode
there's a scene, it's a famous scene where.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
He drives the you Go into a grave. You Go
jokes came out.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Why does a Ugo have rear window to frosters so
it keeps your hands warm when you push it? A
girl in my school out of you Go, and I
remember guys would pick the car up and turn it
perpendicular in her parking space so she couldn't get out.
They didn't do that to someone with a Dotson or
an old beat up Ford.
Speaker 4 (32:04):
They did it to the Yugo. We thought it was funny.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Then dealerships would have one was a toy Yugo sales event.
Buy a Toyota, get a Yugo free. Why did the
Yugo rocket to infamy so quickly? There weren't that many buyers.
It sold about one hundred and twenty five thousand cars.
I don't know the number specifically. That wasn't bad, but
that was a tiny, tiny hundreds and hundreds of a
(32:29):
percentage of the American market. Over that seven or eight
or nine year period, most Americans had never seen a Yugo.
Pop culture was such the force of the jokes and
the joking really overtook the car and became, you know,
kind of common knowledge. It was a truism that the
Yugo was the worst car ever made, whether or not
(32:50):
that was true or not. And again, I'm not defending
the car. It was probably the worst car in the
American market in nineteen eighty six, but it wasn't so
bad that it deserved to be lampoon the way it was.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
It's a car.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
It got in music, it got into art, it got
into everywhere. By two thousand, on Click and Clack NPR,
you know the Tappitt Brothers, that funny show that's no
longer on the air, they had a listener poll what's
the worst car of the millennium, and they voted the
you Go, and I just thought, wow, I guarantee that
(33:25):
most of these people hadn't seen a you Go ever.
But that is the way American pop culture was in
my theory, and what I argue in the book is
being a child of the eighties. I remember this was
the era of you know, you were what you wore,
designer labels, Gucci, Fendy. This was the era when rappers,
(33:48):
in young kids black and white, would rip a Cadillac
symbol off the front, a hood ornament or a Mercedes
hood ornament. You would rip it off of a car.
I never did this. You'd rip it off a car
and where on your neck. I couldn't think of something
that would say I'm more poor than stealing a hood ornament,
but that somehow meant this is what I aspire to,
this is what we valued.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
And I think the ugo was countercultural.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
I just remember that I really would have died if
my parents came home and said, we bought you a
car and it was a UGO. I really probably would
have died at sixteen years old if my parents had
done that. In any other generation, it's a car, big deal,
But in the eighties it was countercultural. It was iconic
for what you did not want.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
To be seen.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Kids would say, it's a car you don't want to
be seen dead in right, and so when you have
an entry level car that is a joke to the youth.
I think you put that all together, Bricklin salesmanship, sending
the Ugo into the stratosphere of the media, and then
also consumer reports, you know, casting it back down, plus
the youth and the culture of the eighties. The Yugo
(34:56):
was just destined to fail. And so Brooklyn's accountant, his CFO,
went to Wall Street trying to find investors, and again
he found just like it happened to Brooklyn with the
Subaru back in the late sixties. They found an investor,
a Wall Street firm. They found money and offered to
(35:19):
buy out Brooklyn, and he received several million dollars I
think it was four maybe five million dollars something. So
he made money on the Yugo, but was, you know,
immediately sued by dealers and people who claim they ripped
him off, and on and on and on, and it
probably had spent beyond his means, and he himself went bankrupt.
But Brooklyn got out I believe in eighty seven or
(35:41):
eighty eight. The car survived but was failing under new management,
and then itself went bankrupt. So you know, this ends
with a Yugoslav civil war. This ends with a country
falling apart in nineteen ninety two. Starting in nineteen ninety one,
the u Go collapses. Everything was sold, the car was
(36:04):
no more, and so the Yugo doesn't exist anymore. You
can go to Serbia today and see you Gos on
the street. They still service them, there's still people that
can fix them, there's still parts available.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
But in general, the Ugo is a very rare bird.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
I bet, I bet there's one hundred in America on
the road, maybe one hundred. I know that Florida in
the early two thousands had two or three registered Yugos
out of seventeen or eighteen million cars, So you know,
it'd be hard pressed to find a Yugo. So you know,
(36:40):
that's kind of the Yugo story in a nutshell, you know,
the rise and fall and the creation of us of
an American icon.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Right. I can't think of a greater icon for failure.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Now that the generation that knew the Edseil, which had
a different reason for failing, wasn't that bad of a car.
Once that generation is gone, the you go, our ed sold.
The Yugo is our great failure. I don't really know
anything else of a product clear coke, maybe laser discs,
maybe or is a failure, But I don't know anything
(37:13):
at that level of failure for a product. Maybe Enron,
you know, maybe some other failures in the Internet, but
nothing for a product has even approached the Ugo in
terms of its It's you know how much it's been
lampooned and taken to heart by the American populace as
one of the worst products ever sold. It wasn't a
(37:35):
good product, but it wasn't as bad as people said,
and it probably was a decent deal at thirty nine
to ninety to tell you the truth.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
It got you where you need it to go. But
that wasn't enough.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
That wasn't enough for American culture of the eighties and
and for Americans even today.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
And a terrific job on the editing, storytelling and production
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
Jason Viewick, author of the Yugo, The Rise and Fall
of the Worst Car in History. It's available wherever you
buy your books. The Story of the Hugo, The Story
of the Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.
(38:12):
Here on our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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