The Yugo, Jason Vuic
The Yugo, Jason Vuic
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The Yugo
The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History

Author: Jason Vuic

Narrator: Erik Synnestvedt

Unabridged: 8 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/08/2010


Synopsis

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends.

Hardly.

The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and it is one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand "good" communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you've got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia's nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo...at the bottom.

About Jason Vuic

Jason Vuic is the author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History and The Sarajevo Olympics: A History of the 1984 Winter Games. A lifelong Buccaneer fan with degrees from Wake Forest University, the University of Richmond, and Indiana University, he grew up in Punta Gorda, Florida, and now lives in Fort Worth, Texas.


Reviews

Goodreads review by George on August 10, 2017

Nothing can make anything funnier then the fact that it actually happened... The Yugo was soled in America, the Yugo jokes at the beginning of each chapter are a cherry on the top. As someone who comes from the country of origin of this "car" I used to look at it as the greatest con ever achieved, w......more

Goodreads review by Yibbie on July 10, 2020

I am not interested in cars. If it runs, has air conditioning, and the radio works, I’m happy. So I don’t think I was the target audience for a book dedicated to one car, but it was very enjoyable anyway. Probably because it is more about the communistic system that manufactured it and the shyster b......more

Goodreads review by Jason on January 09, 2013

First the content: it felt a little padded, like there wasn't enough info on just the car for a whole book. The author would go on what seemed like long tangents about history or a particular person's biography before getting back to the main topic. For example, we got the life story of the guy who......more

Goodreads review by Jon on April 02, 2010

Q. How do you double the value of your Yugo? A. Fill the gas tank. Q. How do you make a Yugo go faster? A. Use a tow truck. The Yugo was rated the worst car ever sold in the U.S. While there are many funny jokes about the Yugo, this is a serious story of how it came to the U.S.......more

Goodreads review by Emmalita on November 20, 2020

If only the Yugo were the worst thing we knew about the former Yugoslavia. The Yugo was both a great idea terribly executed, and a terrible idea that was much more successful than it deserved. In the 1980’s a few people saw a hole in the American car market – a need for a cheap compact car. One of th......more