Behold.
And the guy who originally brought the first ones here is again at the helm.
I drove a Yugo (his name was Victor, but nobody ever got it) for almost five years, which might be a record. I have to say that it really wasn’t that bad a car- the most irritating thing was getting parts for it (almost impossible after the plant closed). It was far better than the Chevette (puke gasp puke) and Festiva (see Chevette and add two pukes) I drove, and its gas mileage (it was stick) was a thing of beauty. I was in two fairly major accidents in the car and it handled both really well.
Of course the fact it was cheap as all hell manifested itself in some annoying ways, like the knob that was always coming off the stick or the window handles that broke off, but mechanically it wasn’t terrible for a tiny car. (Ah, how broke I was.)
One of my favorite Yugo memories was of driving in the wee hours one morning while my very intoxicated egomaniacal boyfriend, ca. 1988, stood up through the sunroof waving at imaginary crowds pretending he was Hitler. I also found out it made a pretty quick getaway car when your intoxicated boyfriend decided to stick a bat out the window and cream a mailbox at an ex-boyfriend’s house.
That article’s from 2002 – and I don’t think anything came of it in three and a half years.
Incidentally, Malcom Bricklin’s latest project is developing and importing a line of Chinese luxury cars.
What is the term for a 4-door Yugo?
We-go!
I don’ t know if they’ll ever come back, but if they do, David Letterman came up with a perfect new model name for them. The Yugo Screwyourself. 
Q: Why do Yugos have rear-window defrosters?
A: So your hands will stay warm while you’re pushing them.
Which is too bad, really, because the swing in gas prices this past year has likely made people more receptive to a small, cheap car that gets good mileage.
I know Yugos are usually the punchline of a joke, but I had a friend who had one back in the mid 80s. We beat the living fuck out of that car and it just kept running right along. They were better then their reputation mechanically. What killed them was the fact that the interiors were not very well built, and when you have heater knobs coming off in your hands, window cranks cracking and upholstery splitting, it seems like a poorly built machine, even if it’s mechanically sound.
“Partially destroyed”? Uh, we bombed that factory every day during the bombing campaign. I have to think that at least one of the military planners owned a Yugo to inspire that kind of wrath.
You know, that little convertable looks pretty sharp, IMHO.
Before Bricklin gave us the Yugo, someone tried importing Dacias from Romania into the US, and evidently the cars were so crappy that the dealerships all died a quick death.
How can you double the value of your Yugo?
ans: Fill it with gasOne of my friends had one. My favorite thing about it was the dashboard controls:
Headlights: on/off switch
Brights: on/off switch
Fan: on/off switch
Heat: on/off switch
And that was it. He didn’t even have a radio, I think. Just four switches. Easily the most minimalistic interior I’ve ever seen.
What was even funnier was that he had an expensive carphone (this was the early 90’s) which at the time was probably worth more than the car.
True story from my Yugo days: I was downsized from my job while driving it and fell on some rough times financially (which for a Yugo driver means “b-roke”). I got two payments behind with a third one due. The collection agent called me and I told them “I can make one payment now- the other past due payment and the due payment I’ll be able to make in about three weeks when I get some money from the job I just started. Til then I can’t do anything.” He was nasty and told me “I have the legal right to have that car repossessed right now, and we just might do that if you don’t get those payments to us within two days.”
I told him “Look… we are talking about a three year old Yugo that has hail damage and has been in two accidents. The resale value is less than the payments I owe. If there’s a neuron in your head that works then I’m not worried you’ll repossess it because you know, I know and everybody with bat brains knows that you’re one helluva lot better off letting me catch up with my $300 in back payments and then finishing up the loan with about $600 more after that than you are in trying to sell this piece of crap that’s the butt of everybody’s jokes, you can’t get parts for and that has a book value of about $12. In fact, how about you just go ahead and repossess it and I’ll give you the $12 and we’ll call it done?”
He had to take it in, but luckily he had two functioning neurons and a slight sense of humor. “Well, I can’t see where you’re wrong on that- I’ll put in that you’ll catch up in a month or two.”