(Photo: Edmunds.com) The automotive punchline of the 1980s: Yugo. A car that has more in common with a large USPS drop-box than it did with the rest of the automotive world. Two-digit horsepower figures, styling that made the Geo Metro look downright classy by comparison, and let’s not forget that the car was really the Zastava Koral, itself a licensed copy of the Fiat 127. The car was dated before it was sold, and how Malcom Bricklin managed to get sell any of the little roller skates in America defies belief, but somehow he managed…possibly because they were the one of the cheapest cars that money could buy. But they did sell, and every once in a great while you occasionally see one that has somehow managed to make it nearly thirty years without being scrapped.
The rough concept behind why Edmunds.com bought a $950 Yugo GVL is based upon penance: Edmunds tests out cars, and generally they have a pretty good selection to choose from. But when everything is good and nothing is bad, how do you know what “bad” is? To answer that question, they sent two guys to Boise, Idaho to purchase the Yugo and drive it all the way back to Los Angeles. Something tells us that they were in trouble well before they got that assignment, the kind of trouble that isn’t forgotten with donuts and coffee one morning. You can read the entire story on the road trip here, and in the meantime you can check out their attempt at a speed record with the 1.1L Fiat-powered lunchbox. Ever wondered what fifty-five hamsters’ worth of power sounds like? Click play below!
I’d gladly take a Yugo over any econobox of today, bar none.
A boring, slow box is still better than a boring, grey jellybean.
Besides, there are all kinds of possibilities here. Why not drop the engine for an AMC 2.5 and 5-speed? Or trace out the intake manifold gasket onto steel plate and use it to adapt VW Bug stack injection and a MegaSquirt onto a worked over stock Yugo head?
The things I could get away with in a Yugo that all today’s nanny state garbage would prevent me from doing to a contemporary car.
My wife bought me a brand new Yugo in ’91, so that Id stop riding my ZX10 Ninja in freezing rain and snow. $3,200. out the door, bumper to bumper two year warranty, they’d even refill your windshield washer bottle! I thought it a great little car, like an early beetle. It seemed pepy enough, but then we discovered the factory had set the cam timing wrong (we wondered how it even ran) and it turned into a genuinely fun little bomber. I’d buy one again today in a N.Y. minute, because as mooseface noted, the cheap crap today, firstly, isn’t that cheap, and it’s all boring, boring, boring.
I should mention, I painted mine with House of Color Violet Pearl white, with candy blue scallops…
Is this Edmunds version of Roadkill?