[BRIEF NOTE] Good bye to the Yugo

[rfmcdonald]

The lineage of the humble Yugo subcompact automobile has come to an end

[T]he last Yugo, once the pride of communist Yugoslavia's automobile industry, will roll off its Serbian production line today in the central town of Kragujevac.

It will be missed here--but probably not in America.

Soon after it hit the U.S. markets in 1986, selling for just $3,990 (U.S.), the boxy Yugo was derided by American car magazines "as barely qualifying as a car" and "an assembled bag of nuts and bolts."

U.S. owners complained of frequent engine failures and transmission problems--with the manual gear sticks sometimes detaching and ending up in their drivers' hands--in addition to passenger doors and trim parts going AWOL.

When the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted crash tests of 23 compacts in 1986, the car with the worst results was the Yugo, with $2,197 worth of damage in slow speed crashes against a flat barrier.

Still, more than 100,000 Yugo GVs--standing for Great Value--were sold in the U.S. before Yugo America, the company that imported it, went bankrupt and Washington imposed economic sanctions on Belgrade for fomenting ethnic wars in the Balkans in 1992.

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Alan Cowell at The New York Times links the Yugo to other Soviet-bloc automobiles, like Czechoslovakia's Skoda, the Soviet Lada, and East Germany's Trabant, as a cherished status symbol, if one that was ultimately inferior to its western European counterparts. The replacement of the Yugo model with other cars is notable mainly for its lateness, although the technology may survive in one form or another--one news source suggests that the Democratic Republic of Congo might take up the torch.