Specifically, they said “better off squeezed into a glass of iced tea than (driven on the road)” - I specifically remember the iced tea remark.
Having once owned a Fiat (a 128 wagon) that my parents bought for me, used, from friends of theirs (I did eventually forgive the 'rents)… I was never tempted to buy a Yugo.
Reverse was NEVER an “option” for Yugos; whoever is telling you that is lying. The cars used a variant of a FIAT 128 transaxle IIRC and they definitely had reverse. I even have a shop manual for them at home somewhere, and I personally took apart several Yugo transmissions (aside from the fact that they always leaked after you took them apart, they were pretty easy to work on and were a good transmission to give a young mechanic to practice on).
I’m just curious: Would a car without Reverse be legally roadworthy? (My own definitely had reverse, though I paid the extra $4.25 for it, which included a free decoder ring.)
That kind of thing, oddly enough, has a lot of appeal among car owners that sing the “older is better!” mantra; those folks are everywhere in my hometown. “It’s simple, and there’s enough room so you can work on it yourself!”
I think it’s not “older is better” but “simpler is better”. There’s a thread in the pit about having to pay close to $200 to get a duplicate of a key made. I definitely do not need the remote key thing as I am perfectly happy to do it the old fashioned way.
If all you need is a very basic car to get around and go to the grocery store and your finances are limited then it makes sense to get the cheapest thing which will fill the bill.
I never understood people who open the hood and think a lot of space is a bad sign. It’s better than having to extract the engine in order to change a lightbulb.
A couple years ago a friend bought a DVD player and I rapidly did what I do with everything: I opened it. When he saw it was mostly empty space inside he felt cheated.
That may depend on what State you’re in. In my State, reverse is not specified as mandatory for any motor vehicle.
Obligatory link to the webpage about the Yugo Sculpture exhibit, which I was lucky enough to catch when it first toured in the 90s.
And yes, I remember that CR had some fine words for this vehicle, including that it barely qualified to be defined as a car. As mentioned before, it was an already dated design for the time, but by no means obsolete; but it enjoyed all the blessings IRT materials procurement, process quality and pride-in-workmanship of communist industry plus there was the matter of being able to get parts from Yugoslavia. But really, it was “you get what you pay for”.
Folks were too impressed by the idea of $4,000 (1986) for a brand-new car; but as mentioned, that was counting on that for at least the term of the loan note upkeep expense would be minimal. When it turned out to be just a cheap car that was not so cheap to keep up, folks became annoyed.
Small nitpick, Sampiro: the Ford Festiva was NOT American-made: IIRC it was Korean made (I think by Kia?) like the Aspire; from back when the Korean cars gave junk a bad name. That’s another thing: Just as Yugo came to America, I think the same or very next year came Hyundai, and for many years Korean cars were also presumed crappy; however in that case the public was a bit more tolerant – they were cheap, but were more substantial than Yugos, parts/service were less of a bitch, aided in part by the preexisting networks of Japanese or US domestic sister-companies (a major advantage), and in the end they had a lot of commonalities with more familiar lower-end Japanese models (many were sold badged as Mitsubishis, in fact) so that American consumers could relate to that driving experience, and the Korean brands toughed it out to become mainstreamed, even if they “couldn’t get no respect”.
Yugo, OTOH, went the same way as its eponymous homeland. Oh well. I’ll always dig the one turned into a giant Zippo lighter or Bell telephone 
I have a college friend who was still driving a Yugo in 2005. I offered him five bucks for it, which I considered more than fair. 
He didn’t.
Robin
My friend Rolf took me skiing one year during spring break in Illinois. We drove his mom’s Yugo up to Wisconsin - it was a few hours during a pretty good snowstorm, late at night (I remember leaving late and arriving as the sun was rising).
If you have never been a passenger, under those conditions, in a Yugo being driven by a guy who learned how to drive in Germany, you haven’t lived.
75mph the whole damn way, no chains or even snow tires IIRC, no loss of control at any point. One episode that is burned into my brain is when we were zipping along and spotted a snowplow up ahead, clearing the road. Rolf did not slow down, he simply passed on the side where all the snow was being blasted out of the plow - I had enough time to leave fingerprints in whatever parts of the car I instinctively grabbed and yell “What are you doing?!” before he rocketed through this stream of snow; the car lurched to one side a little bit and then we were past.
I can’t speak to the overall reliability of the Yugo but that one worked extremely well in the cold and snow for a few days and while the engine undoubtedly has a “Dustbuster” nameplate on it somewhere, the car itself only weighed about twelve pounds so it ran like a bat out of hell.
Oner= morning Kevbabe and I were leaving a restaurant next to a Dunkin’ Donuts and my jaw dropped. “What are you looking at?” she asked. What I was looking at was a Yugo with the suspension compressed to the point where it looked as though it might have high centered on a freshly minted dime, stuffed to the gills with people. Seven people got out of that Yugo…mom, dad, and 5 kids none younger than 10 or so. All at least overweight, and more than half well into obese territory…no strangers to DD were they. I was mightily impressed that the thing made it there, and gave every appearance of being daily driven in such a state. I didn’t take up with Kevbabe until '91 or so, so Yugos hadn’t been sold in a while by then.
I liked mine a lot. Bought for $4000. Drove it like hell for 4 years. Both times it needed repair it was under warranty and the dealer was able to fix it in less than 1 day. I think I definately got my moneys worth out of it.
I’m curious … how many Yugos are still on the road in the United States? Occasionally, I’ll still see some 1970s or 1980s disposable car on the road as a daily driver; Chevettes, Vegas, Pintos and the like, but it’s been years since I’ve seen a Yugo.
Yugo, Lada, Wartburg, Polski, loads of fun!
A “detail” I remembered while looking at pics of Yugos online (this thread has me really nostalgic somehow):
I don’t think any Yugo ever sold new (before the market collapsed) for the actual $3990, and mine was somewhere around $4600-$4700. One of the extras was- I kid you not- about $20 for a “sporty racing stripe” (actual phrase used). That racing stripe made all the difference between people thinking it was a Yugo and a new kind of Jag.
Mine also had a sunroof, but I can’t remember whether that was an added feature.
This interior pic (of one that evidently sold on ebay- there’s usually at least a couple, always with the word “collector’s item” and usually a few hundred dollars) reminds me of the thing I hated most about the car, which was the absolute no frills cheapness of the interior:
1- Notice the cheap carpet on the door. This was about the thickness of a cheap doormat, literally (not one with a rubber backing either). Under that was the metal (or were the doors fiberglass? don’t remember) itself.
2- Notice the incredibly small and chincy door handles: I never knew a Yugo driver who didn’t lose at least one of those within the year and thereafter have to open it through the window or from the other side.
3- There was a tiny (locking) glove box, but no dash- none. You couldn’t keep even a road map there- it would slide off.
4- Those switches on the left side are the lights, fans, and blinkers- the two to the right indicate this was the “luxury model” as in mine they were empty.
5- The speakers haven’t lost their covers- that’s how they looked.
I think the reason this thread makes me nostalgic is the knowledge that “no matter how irritating life may get or how bad the economy is, at least I’m not driving a Yugo anymore”. When I think of the car I start having a sense-memory of being hot as hell due to the broken AC, and literally- empty containers from a meal for two at McDonald’s and a couple of textbooks [I was in college at the time] would make the front passenger seat cluttered- you’d have to move them for anyone to sit down as they wouldn’t be able to touch the floor with their feet if they were of average house.
As mentioned, I used to haul mental patients when I drove the Yugo. One was an enormous guy named Obadiah- probably a good 350 pounds- who literally made it visibly noticeably (to people both inside and out) lean to the passenger side.
One of my favorite memories that “can now be told” was the night that my first boyfriend and I {won’t digress into and go there but let’s just say a majorly effed up relationship from way back} trashed a ritzy neighborhood in Montgomery (bats to the mailboxes, dragging the trashcans and releasing, etc.) in that Yugo. My boyfriend[ish person]- and this really is true, I’d tell you if he was- was NOT a neo-Nazi or white supremacist of any kind, but he was (as I was) fascinated with WW2. On the way out of the neighborhood (he was drunk and high at the time- I was sober actually) opened the sunroof, stood through it, and recreated Hitler’s victory ride through Paris, giving a Nazi salute and screaming German (which he couldn’t speak- but it sounded Germanish). Especially by a black or Jewish cop, even though it was petty vandalism/no real harm done (a couple of mailboxes and some cleanup), I’d still be in prison, it was one of my “I don’t know WTF just happened or WTF got into me”, and yet… I remember it with a smile. (But then if you can’t smile at cheap cars, destruction and imitating Hitler, what can you smile at?)
Didn’t the shifter and clutch scare the crap out of you? It really did feel like they were connected by bailing wire or maybe rubber bands.
One listing currently on ebay, price is $570 after 21 bids.
I was driving home one night and stepped on the clutch… and it stayed there! Literally just- went down and didn’t get up. I got a backyard mechanic to fix it and it wasn’t terribly much (about $100 or so, though that seemed like a fortune at the time).
What scared me most, and the reason that to this day I can’t stand driving a stick (the exception on the SDMB I found out in one thread) was having to stop at a redlight or for any other reason on an incline. There are several service roads and fairly steep streets where I live that have red lights and stop signs, and you had to use the emergency break to even have a fighting chance of the car not rolling back into whoever was behind you.
Not sure if you still drive a standard, but it is possible to let the clutch out halfway and give it a little gas at the same time to stand still on an incline. Not good for the clutch, and not recommended on a daily basis, but if some jerk is right on my ass stopped on a hill this is what I do.
I knew an Indian guy named Givi who bought one because the US market model was the GV.
Incidentally, the Yugo was Malcolm Bricklin’s second try at importing a vehicle whose low price failed to compensate for its gross unsuitability to the American market. First there was the Subaru 360.
