I was sure youd have had one. I frankly dont know how anything this poor could ever be made. I remember checking them out back in I think 1986 at a local dealer and loved that bright blue they were offering at the time, called Adriatic Blue. Film Focus: Drowning Mona. They would swap in the drivetrain from the Fiat X1/9 and put on the wider wheels tires from the X1/9 also. I really dont think that anyone has a competitive advantage in rust resistance any more. They dumped em, too, as soon as they could afford something, anything, better. @Jeff Nelson: I think youre a bit dismissive of Zastava, they have been around for quite some time. I cant recall reading anything positive about the vehicle, anywhere. It had nervousness built into it, it made people nervous and it was nervous. Even in Western Europe, cars arent marketed as they are here. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . . The little cars--all Yugos--are almost identical; they only differ in color, and Rona's has a sunroof. Zastava Zastava made Yugos even after they stopped selling in America. But even in those circumstances, the car was not that bad as public opinion in USA about it. Sales quickly slowed when word of the myriad problems began to circulate in the media. The place where I used to work was given a Yugo 45. I really believe that the cars were treated as disposable, and in that way expectations were met. By third world standards, the Yugo was not a terribly bad car and sales continued even after its mother country began breaking up in the early 90s. They probably would have found a customer base in the U.S. For the rest of the scene, he is dry from the waist up. The philosophy behind Drowning Mona is not good clean fun, or even intelligent nasty fun. One of the sight gags is that everyone in town drives a Yugo, thereby using personalized license plates as a necessity more than anything else.) Im guessing the sport badging is why the decimal point is so far to the right? But the proof of the pudding is the tasting; and I have YET to see a government-built car, or other product or service, which could stand head to heat with private competionstand on MERIT. Two cars are in the driveway of a glorious but faded Victorian mansion: The Bertone and a Yugo. I had been driving a Datsun 200 SX and the 5 speed was like silk. They found slipshod handling of stamped body panels, and the assembly lines using dirty, even dented panels; he found painting in dusty areas, not the clean, dust-free booths required for good paint covering and adhesion. I recall seeing the garage full of yugos being worked on when Id take mine in and I recall seeing them dead on the side of the road everywhere. To see mine riding on a tow truck was so humiliating. there used to be a sign on the front that said visionary vehicles but that came down at least two years ago. I wonder why they used the Yugos, To show the towns Quirkyness? But theres a difference between an easily-repaired car, and one that needs frequent repairs. how did Subaru make the transition from dangerous sardine can to granola FWD/AWD family compact in the US?. First of all, thanks to Perry Shoar for a very well written explanation of the events of the 70s and 80s that led to the meltdown of Yugoslavia. It was amazing (to me) how they found a solution so quickly. He lost his house, his fortuneAnd the dozens of Yugo GVs that he received as part of his settlement with his bankers. Of course not. It was embarrassing, mother never drove it again. Also spare parts were inexpensive and any mechanic and his nephew would fix it. Too many people in this country have this mentality that if its cheap, treat it as such and yes, a fulfilled prophesy. Although I tested it in the summer, the car sputtered and hesitated like it was cold. Yes they were cheap, but it was a proper car, built properly. It is a measure of the local intelligence that when the car and driver are dragged to shore some hours later, the doctor checks her pulse. Holy mackerel, Goe, what a story and experience! On the side fixed windows was lettered YuGo BIG or YuGo HOME. She does figure in a quiet little in-joke. YUGO caps and shirts and other fun car show displays. One time the shifter came off in my hand. I would venture to guess that there are fewer than 500 running condition Yugos still on the road in the U.S. (most of which need a little TLC) Anybody that ever owned one of these little mobile gulags will tell you that there was nothing loveable, cute or endearing about them. Second occurred during 1994-95, having changed employment by then, while driving the 50+ miles each morning, Id notice Yugos of different colors pass me on the four lane driven by the same fellow. Malcom Bricklin The twice bankrupt Bricklin has resurfaced periodically over the years, always pushing the latest crack brained scheme to sell a car that would occupy the place that his Yugo once did- the bottom rung of the American market. Lack of an automatic would hamper the car during all but the final year in the states. Of course a $800 car isnt worth shyte to the insurance company, so they gave me a token $1000 for my time and trouble (another story). The possibility upsets Ellen, who explains in some of the movie's best dialogue: "I can't marry a murderer. i cant imagine where bricklin would get the approximately $35k/mo rent. And, with such an unsatisfying ending and its inability to capitalize on a potentially funny situation, it's a film that you probably shouldn't rush to see on DVD. I have NEVER burned out a clutchexcept on a Yugo. After the 1973 oil shock and protracted period of economic stagnation globally, Western markets had less incentive to buy anything from Yugoslavia. About a year or so into owning the blue one, the clutch cable snapped (in traffic, of course). What kind of sicko lives there? Had the car been screwed together properly, and had there been an engineering department to iron out the bugs, it could have had a long run. The car is the Yugo. Actually, the GM B body starting in 1977 was very, very resistant to corrosion. Nuff said? (A former test site for the Yugo car company, we're told. The film also stars Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, William Fichtner, Marcus Thomas, and Peter Dobson. Nobody had let management know that the wiring harness as made, wasnt usable in that part of the car. The Yugo was not always viewed so favorably, although its $3,990 price ($9,900 in today's dollars) grabbed headlines on its introduction in 1985. But what about quality disasters in a different scenario?. I saw one on the F4 so they did sell one.Those were a Polish Fiat 500 updated Just rubbish. Since it had the potential to continue the well-regarded reputation of the Autobianchi A112 base car as a small model in markets like the US compared to the SWB Fiat 127 derived car that become the infamous half-baked small Yugo. IIRC, David E Davis even tried to help move these things by stating in Automobile that he was going to send his daughter off to college in one. The last ones left in my hometown got a stay of execution when the city received a good number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s; many of them bought Yugos and got mobile for next to nothing since they knew how to keep them running. He drove them all fast and hard which no doubt shortened their operational life. A Mitsubishi in all but name, Proton wisely didnt fiddle around with it much meaning you got a reliable Pseudo-Japanese car for your money, not a cobbled together lash up like the yugo was. It just flat refused. Because he SAYS he has a new belt on there, doesnt mean its so. [SOUNDBITE - clip from Drowning Mona trailer, 2000] Every car in the movie, save for the police vehicle and a main character's landscaping pickup, is a . Down shifting was scary, sometimes you just had to bypass second, sometimes it refused to even go into gear or it would get stuck in gear. Detroit, also, but not so much. ), it was quite good. Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons. Me and my friend Jerry (from Sam Bonds) drove a Yugo at a wrecker yard in Coburg some years back. i doubt they are still there. Paid less than a thousand for it, thought at the time it was a good buy. A quiet little in-joke indeed, but I mention it so the filmmakers will know their work was not in vain. Copyright 2011 - 2023 Curbside Classics. They pronounce it yugo and Bricklins people realized a car called Jugo would have problems in marketing. They found problems in the assembly processone described was how the wiring harness to the rear liftgate and wiper, didnt fit the stamped holes allowed it. Required fields are marked *. and lso two Horizon ? Id notice the original Civic CVCC, I had one, loved it and sold it much too soon. I drove it in Atlanta rush hour traffic, it got about 40MPG and I grew to really like the little beast. It is my understanding the latter Yugos were much better than their earlier counterparts, but still not up to snuff with the worst(?) Both were good strong running vehicles and the only thing I remember having trouble with was remedied by tightening up the battery to starter connection on one of the cars. But like so much of his other stuff, the deal fell through. Both were sold for more than I paid. In the beginning they had some brief text ( "Years ago, the Yugo Car Company chose Verplanck, New York, to test market its new breed of vehicle. The sexy Marsha Brady girl with the bellbottoms in the Subaru commercials is unforgettable. I attach a picture of a 1100,the previous model,(5 door too! Needless to say, it wouldve been better if Bently had just gone ahead and let them have the Mulsanne. if(document.getElementById("unic-ccpa")) { The Yugos bait was a stunningly low MSRP of just $3990. Actually, Perry did a much better job of it than I could have. DROWNING MONA 1/2 Tasteless but sporadically uproarious black comedy. Well life handed me a whole pile a' shit! At first glance, the car looked up to date- Front wheel drive, rack and pinion steering, decent mileage. Not a bit ! Membership also saw a similarly sharp increase, with over 1,800,000 in the same year (300,000 more than in 1970). If Germany had built it, would it have been called the Germ? The brakes appear to have been tampered with, making it murder. The blue one had seen much more use than the red one, but it was still a good runner. Kei cars still exist, but the engine size and dimensional standards have been increased somewhat, and the newer Kei cars tend to be very tall, boxy affairs to create the maximum possible cubic footage of interior room within the package limits. Had Bricklin been a true industrialist instead of a con-man, the winning idea might have been to buy out the Yugo tooling (Zastava was setting up for the Florida at the time, they might have been open to this) and moved the whole plant to a place where workmen were conscientious and quality control accepted. She is a bit of a contrarian anyhow, and has a mechanic-relative. Everyone in Verplanck, N.Y., drives a Yugo. document.getElementById("unic-gdpr").style.display = 'inline'; No argument with the political details of your well made point. By May of 1988, Malcom Bricklin needed a lifeboat and he found it on Wall Street. . Nasty Mona Dearly (Midler) drives her car into the Hudson River and drowns. Maybe Bricklin had caught lightning in a bottle. When the nastiest resident (Bette Midler) of a white-trash Westchester suburb is killed in a suspicious accident, everyone if (window['UnicI'].geo === 'CA') { I knew I wasnt buying a Lexus. The worst of the Japaneese cars would rust in structural places that would make the car unsafe. Of course, I was charmed by that, as it reminded me very much of the original A1 Golf, and seemed to share the same utility that the original A1 did. The 71-76 GM full-sizers were better than average on this count. The one thing that the Yugo shared with its Fiat ancestry, was the fact that these things were biodegradable in the midwest. A Rolls-Royce Ghost, a Mercades S-class, and a Bently Mulsane. Childrens toys are more dependable. Well, as they say, two out of three aint bad. My point is more that while suited for its home market, the Yugo was a cynical attempt by its promoter to make a quick buck by appealing to the most fickle, least loyal of all purchasers-the price shopper.It is only coincidental that the car was built in Yugoslavia. But, I decided that going back into the printing business made more sense to me, so I left the car lot and headed back to what I call work. In a totalitarian state, such as was Yugoslavia, there is no political embarrassment because criticism is a criminal offense. Also in Drowning Mona's favor, at the heart of the movie, is a genuinely positive character, Verplanck Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito).He's possibly the only principled citizen in town. Yeah, theres no question on really poor build quality. Witness the fact that everyone's car of choice is a Yugo; each Verplanck citizen drives one ever since the company conducted a cheap sales test of the vehicle there some 10 years ago. How quickly they developed larger cars was a product of how well capitalized each company was and how much their senior management (some of which was deeply conservative, even by Detroit standards) was willing to make the investment in export-specific products. I owned one. It was mainly low used values (the proton badge had no snob appeal) and apathy that saw them scrapped rather than any major fault of the car. During the time the clutch cable was dying, I broke the shifter mechanism, due to the clutch cable dying. a special for the movie,an extended version,or just my failing memory? its a beautiful nineteenth century townhouse that was redesigned combining the 19th century iron front with a modern glass setback. And the A/C system on the Yugo was an add on! A girl I hung out with in college had a Yugo. Theyre really a mishmash of the two; with their own unique body. Wikipedia says that the Yugo quality was satisfactory at the start but went downhill fast and the factory refused to do anything about it. With Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, Peter Dobson, Will Ferrell, William Fichtner, Raymond O'Connor, Marcus Thomas and . Just started slipping, on a highway as flat as a calm oceanand over the next five hours I had to shift into lower and lower gears just to minimize slippage. I think that for a 1992 car (perhaps it should be a Serb-o? Usually, these ultra-cheapo cars suffer from goofy styling touches, but the Yugo comes off as pretty clean, which is all the more astonishing since its an original design where no body parts interchange with the Fiats upon which it was based. This article, like many here, evoked some fond memories. Now they are all scared by digital cameras and this are just some memories from the other side of the iron curtain. But that's a whole other story.") After we meet the local residents, we understand why they're driving them now: They can't afford to replace them. } I remember the lights were tied to the ignition switch so if you left the light switch on, theyd go off when you shut down the car, and back on when you started it back up, and that meant headlights and all, ala SAAB. Dispose of the rest of the car. 2) My wife (an engineer like yourself) has been to Dubrovnik and says that the beaches are incredible. } Much embarrassment was caused to Toyota when it was found domestic panels had been mistakenly exported to NZ for local assembly we keep cars forever and these rusted out under a year on local limestone based and cowshit covered roads. One reason is that lots of people own and drive them and parts are a breeze. However, the 67 cu inch motor had plenty of power if you kept it revved, and I never really had a problem keeping up with traffic. Two YUGO watches, new. They took in much more foreign revenue and as the economy began to fail more and more fundamentally, the leaders of those republics decided theyd be better off independent of Yugo. Having had some up-close contact with a 128, Id say that its more 128 than 127. Ive heard that by 1989, Malcolm Bricklin was kicked out and Zastava took over importing the cars to the US and made a substantial series of changes/improvements and the cars then came with fuel injection, the GV, GVL, GVC, and GVS and the sportier GVX were combined into one car, the GV Plus fitted with better seats (the fold and slide seats from the GVX), the larger 1.3L 4, the 5spd in a more basic interior and exterior trim package, adding the AC etc and Bosh fuel injection and I hear from Chris Vitale who runs Fiat 500 USA blog who owned a 1991 Yugo with FI until a couple of years or so ago that by then, their warranty claims were very good, but the war took its toll as did the emissions debacle in 1992 brought the cars run in the US to an end. Honestly, I think Zastava should be commended for the amount of engineering they were able to do independently, modifying and developing Fiat cars. Ive been around big rigs all of my life, but they never looked bigger than when I was next to them on the freeway. A revised constitution in the mid 70s turned the country into a loose confederation and as Croatia/Slovenia were more developed due to being part of Austria Hungary, there was only so much that approx thirty years of prosperity after WWII could reverse. Modern kei cars are dimensionally similar to the old sidevalve english Fords tall and narrow hopefully they dont fall over as easily I see lots of elderly people driving used import keis here. Frequently, that new model sets the status quo on its ear and forever changes the way we think about (and react to) our transportation needs. The poor gal, if I remember, was named Lelo. That explains why everyone was driving them then. I recall taking my younger brother out to teach him how to drive. The last Yugo I saw was 12 years ago, parked by a gas station in Truckee oh, and a restored Yugo was for sale on Craigslist a bit ago but I figured that would be a bad idea on the Subaru front: I heard a rumor, years ago, that Fuji bought all the American 360s and had them crushed any truth to that? I had two of them. They didnt always start, and they DID always rust away. The two-door chassis is, I understand, a 127. Back in another shop (an independent who specialized in Fiats) there was some general loose talk about popping a 128 engine in there; but given a verbal estimate, I cut it off. But I was unprepared for the panoply of problems that came abouteverything from a latent short or current leak, that would kill the car and prevent starting without warning (to restart, the only way was to pull the battery terminal to let whatever relay was behind it, reset) to binding heater-control cables. At our Year 2000 track day at Lime Rock, one of the entries was a race-prepared Yugo. Director Nick Gomez Writer Peter Steinfeld Stars Danny DeVito Bette Midler Neve Campbell Finallywith a new clutch 400 miles oldit tossed the alternator belt. I saw one not long ago on the streets in Eugene, but couldnt catch it., Theres got to be a comeback there! At first glance, the car looked up to date- Front wheel drive, rack and pinion steering, decent mileage. Also, the GM Colonades from 73-77 were pretty rust resistant as well. Someone steeped in the maintenace required to keep something like a Trabant running would probably be right at home with a Yugo. Of course, as pointed out, it was more probable that hed have put the company out of business, too. What kind of car is in the movie Drowning Mona? if (!readyGEO) { People's spotty memories and clumsy lies complicate the investigation, and the . Yugo-mania also swept through Hollywood for a time and was the star car in movies such as The Birdcage, Drowning Mona, Die Hard 3, The Crow, Inspector Gadget and 101 Dalmatians. I initially got a job selling cars, and had access to one for a while. Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell are both known as "Final Girls" or "Scream Queens", playing recurring heroines in their respective horror franchise films: Curtis in the "Halloween" franchise and Campbell in the "Scream" franchise--which is loosely based on the "Halloween" mythos. I remember the shifter being very vague and rubbery but it did the job and the car wasnt too bad on other respects and I rather liked its styling. That's not who I am. Yes you read that right. @EdDan: How do you double the value of your Yugo? If youre familiar with the descent of that once-vaunted company into its current sorry state, appears as if they had too many of this type in management. Ford 2000 Diesel Cold-Blooded and Worn Out, http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/wannabe-warhol?page=0, http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_113306-Plymouth-Horizon-C2-1984.html, https://chrisoncars.com/yugo-victim-or-victimizer/, https://www.carkeys.co.uk/news/the-story-of-the-yugo-the-worst-car-in-the-world, https://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/03/the-best-worst-cars-ever/, https://blastmagazine.com/2014/05/13/truth-10-cars-never-hit-road/, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jan/14/cover/#, https://jalopnik.com/the-yugo-is-not-the-worst-car-ever-and-anyone-who-says-1830229976, 1987-91 Ford F-Series Bustruck Monster Mashup, COAL 2010 Subaru Forester Green, Its What Makes A Subaru, A $ubaru, Cohort Pic(k) of the Day: 1963(?) Yugoslavia The Land Of The Southern Slavs went to war with itself in late 1991 and essentially spent the next 17 years shooting, ethnically cleansing and generally behaving like it had before World War I. Initially, I had my eyes set on a mid 80s Toyota Celica as the cheapest car I could find. What do you call a Yugo with twin exhausts? When they all disappeared, I surmised it was because he had been caught by the police for driving unregistered vehiclesmore likely they all just died from their terminal junkiness. As for the first gen Civics and to a lesser extent, the second gen Civics, I would guess where we dont have rust to deal with, it was 30+ years and many accrued miles that ultimately were their demise, ie, 200K-300K+ and a head gasket finally blows are what killed them off eventually if not an accident or some other mechanical failure due to age/mileage. About two years ago there was a Wall Street Journal article about a guy who drag races a Yugo. They start, get you to your destination in the dry, and thats about all you can saytheres no enjoyment in operating it and build quality was a joke. They sold boatloads of them in Europe to price buyers, taxi companies, retired folk etc. When they came unglued from rot, there was no there there to support the structure. This was not a design fault, but like the Corvair, the company seriously underestimated the ability of the American motorist to neglect even basic maintenence. It WAS a simple-to-work-on car; and in that regard I appreciated it. But the little Yugo turned out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.
Hilton Head Mayor Political Party,
I Survived Mary Vincent,
Kingwood Yard Sales,
Articles D