Appologies for not-nice-said, but there is no other way to do it. Some Japanese automakers seem to have been surprisingly resistant to the latter; that was a major complaint of Yutaka Katayama at Nissan. They were true babes in the woods, and they lacked the capital to deal with the investment and the costs of distributing cars. Another movie moment: Nick drives a Yugo in the film _Nick & Norahs Infinite Playlist_. He was scarred sh*tless and begging me to not make him drive it. Someone wanted her dead. The story involves a local police chief from New York state who is charged with . Purchased one year old cars for less than $1500 while attending college. With an estimated cost of $16,000 each to build against a selling price of around $5K, Bricklins SV-1 was a blast furnace that no amount of subsidy could fully quench.The maritime province had sunk over four and a half million taxpayer dollars into the scheme since its beginning, and slow sales (along with numerous engineering problems) cost no small number of politicians their jobs. Bette Midler chops off son's hand. But then my wife (of all people) found a Yugo for $800. The Yugo was based on a mash up of models 127 and 128 built under license by a wildly unproductive workforce in an obsolete factory with assembly quality that made real mid 70's Fiats look hand built. 2004-2023 IMCDb.org Managed by Controgest SPRL Also, this post made me curious: how did Subaru make the transition from dangerous sardine can to granola FWD/AWD family compact in the US? Pictures provided by: garco, antp, ahight, Display options: Display as images Display as list The poor gal, if I remember, was named Lelo. When the coroner first jumps into the water to check Mona's dead body, he is neck-deep in water. The Mopar fuselage cars were not too bad, but the 71 on up B bodies were not so good. It is difficult to overstate how rustprone 1970s Japaneese cars were. Based on the slightly larger Fiat 125, it was everything bad about a lada, but somehow worse. Drowning Mona is a 2000 U.S. crime comedy starring Danny DeVito as Wyatt Rash, a local police chief from Verplanck, New York, who investigates the mysterious death of Mona Dearly (played by Bette Midler), a spiteful, loud-mouthed, cruel and around the town highly unpopular woman, who drove her son's Yugo off the . A girl I hung out with in college had a Yugo. Only the Italians could design a car to be so much fun to drive so slowly. It was as if the Yugo was being promoted as crap, but SUPERIOR crap. And was thus more expensive. Found it! I saw this movie. There was a dealer in Denver Colorado, called Apple Motors, who used to sell warmed up Yugos. 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 was enrolled in a community class marketing course and the teacher brought up the Yugo, and was joking about it. At inopportune times. . Also in that time, poor workmanship wasnt exclusively Yugos problem. It couldnt be trusted just sitting in the parking lot. Two cars are in the driveway of a glorious but faded Victorian mansion: The Bertone and a Yugo. What kind of sicko lives there? *shakes tiny fist*. https://jalopnik.com/the-yugo-is-not-the-worst-car-ever-and-anyone-who-says-1830229976, The Yugo Is Not the Worst Car Ever and Anyone Who Says That Is a Lazy Hack So Lets Prove It, Your email address will not be published. There are lots of related legacies connected with Americas brief, mad affair with the Yugo. But back to the subject, shortage of all kind of raw material was the main reason for poor quality, not drunken workers. if (window['UnicI'].geo === 'CA') { Both were sold for more than I paid. The biggest thing Ive heard was the timing belts were supposedly good for 30K miles and many owners were caught off guard, mostly due to not reading and/or heeding the maintenance intervals and boom, they croaked as they were not non interference motors like most OHC motors arent. She put about 50,000 miles on it without a problem-it was scrapped when she got rear-ended by a Camry. if (window['UnicI'] && window['UnicI'].geo && window['UnicI'].geo !== '-' ) { It was owned by a gentleman named Dave Benton who claimed to be the former engineering manager for Yugo North America. They didnt always start, and they DID always rust away. The U.S. stuff was bad enough in that era, but the European cars were (by and large) even worse and the Japaneese were worse by orders of magnatude. I dont buy junk to begin with, maintain them, and only have minimal issues with them. the building is used several times a month for exclusive private hip-hop dance parties. This was almost $1100 lower than the cheapest Chevy Sprint and lower than even the Hyundai Excel. Maybe Bricklin had caught lightning in a bottle. This is the real reason that Yugo failed in the US- a poor dealer network. there used to be a sign on the front that said visionary vehicles but that came down at least two years ago. After we meet the local residents, we understand why they're driving them now: They can't afford to replace them. But then thats not what most folks are exactly looking for. The blue one had seen much more use than the red one, but it was still a good runner. Everyone in Verplanck, N.Y., drives a Yugo. She picked them up for virtually nothing and was content with bare-bones transportation. . I think it's worth keeping them separate because it's a in-joke of the film that almost everyone has a Yugo. The problems experienced with Yugos, were unknown to new-car buyers in that era; were entirely avoidable with better assembly and simple correction of design and process mistakes; and were connected to durability related to poor design or engineering. If I remember correctly, the car was equipped with all the usual goodies a Fiat engine with dual Webers, full roll cage, sticky racing tires, etc. This car didnt want to go into reverse at a standstill. The other Eastern European lemon sold in Australia at the same time as the Niki was the Lada Samara. I remember seeing new Yugos at the (I think 1990) Chicago Auto Show. 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 think that for a 1992 car (perhaps it should be a Serb-o? Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons. She was rather negligent about maintenance, so would have been tough on any vehicle, but her Yugo, like many of its kind, fell apart rather quickly, stressing a budget that was already tight. I was worried that shed make it. -Because they have already been through hell. Had Bricklin given the tooling to the Koreans, and had it built to their standards under contracthed have had what he wanted. It would be interesting to see how the rear suspension was beefed up. With just 25 horsepower (at a cacophonous 5500 RPM), the elfin 360 was the type of cynical exercise that would define Bricklins career in the car business. What he saw was an operation that turned out a car designed (and abandoned) by Fiat years before. Did it even come close? Ive never felt safe in any car that light so would never have considered owning one, no matter how cheap, even if they had been decently made vehicles. Various ancillaries like alternators were replaced with real FIAT parts. But youre right that would mean being a business man and not a con-artist. Hell, I was 20 years younger, A lot can change in that time. They dumped em, too, as soon as they could afford something, anything, better. I drove the blue one about three more years, but it did have some issues. But these Yugos aren't just a frivolous component of the storythey're essential to establishing the wacky tone of the film. The interior squeaked everywhere that it didnt rattle. He was a statistician in the War Department who became interested in using statistical controls to produce higher-quality manufactured goods. Required fields are marked *. I frankly dont know how anything this poor could ever be made. I started to work in 1985 as a young engineer in the factory producing electrical equipment for the industry, and was very aware about problems we faced at the time. It is the cheapest person that spends the most. Its the manifestation of the postwar Japanese industrial culturepredicated on continuous quality improvement; and with the use of statistical controls to produce ever-higher quality items with fewer deviations from specification. I did appreciate the way Yugo could make one part do what a western car needed three for. I owned one. Or maybe not. 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. 2) At the 2014 Route 66 Mother Road Festival in Springfield, Illinois there was a Yugo with a Chrysler 426 Hemi (with blower) in the rear of the car (Hemi under glass). Sales ended in the U.S. that year when a recall was ordered by the feds over emissions issues related to faulty carburetors. The one thing that the Yugo shared with its Fiat ancestry, was the fact that these things were biodegradable in the midwest. Well, as they say, two out of three aint bad. Bowfinger - The main character produced a documentary called The Yugo Story. Here in Greece they are still around and not that rare. 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. Kind of reminds me of a first generation Rabbit/Golf, which Ive always considered the gold-standard for the best styled small car. For the rest of the scene, he is dry from the waist up. At only 20,000 miles it was worn out, fading, under powered, rusting, it wanted to die and be buried, it certainly didnt want to be a car! Also i believe that the whole project couldnt last very long because Crvena Zastava never had economic strength to satisfy such demanding market, which requires first class quality, excellent dealer network and a newer and bigger model every year, just to stay in business. The Yugo was based on a mash up of models 127 and 128 built under license by a wildly unproductive workforce in an obsolete factory with assembly quality that made real mid 70s Fiats look hand built. He was rather sad that after 170,000 miles it had The Florida was reviewed very positively in the UK against western cars, and sadly only failed here because of the rise of Fascism in Yugoslavia, and its aftermath.. During WWII, they built a few Jeeps. 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. Rona Mace (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an anagram for "a romance". That brochures more collectible than its car. (function waitGEO() { It broke down like a Yugo. The Yugo, new clutch, new exhaust, patched wiring and all, went into the trash. Zastava built some world class arms. But what about quality disasters in a different scenario?. For Some Thematic Elements, Language and Brief Sexuality, Berlinale 2023 Highlights, Part Two: Reality, Manodrome, The Adults, Inside, Golda, Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Fraser, Cate Blanchett, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson Feted at SBIFF 2023, Revisiting Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Tragically Common: Jamie Dack, Lily McInerny and Jonathan Tucker on Palm Trees and Power Lines. He sat in the front seat once and never again! In a recent episode of Top Gear UK the trio were allegedly asked by an alleged high-ranking member of the alleged Romanian Mafia what would be the best luxury car for one of his stature. But it needed even more tweaking than did the Jugo 45which is what the Yugo was based on. What kind of car is in the movie Drowning Mona? . Install shift knob on replacement car. Bricklin often says that the first model year or so of production the cars were well assembled and then once Zastava saw the money they let things slip. Bricklin used franchise fees to run the company (a major accounting no-no) while the car was being modified for safety and emissions certification in the U.S. and dealerships were sold, territories assigned. But Bricklin assured his erstwhile investors that the car could be made ready for the U.S. market with some minor tweaks. There was nothing inherently wrong with the 360, and all the other Japanese manufacturers had a car at the time with more or less similar features. There were surely other goofs that were institutionalized. Of course, not wanting to be associated with alleged members of the alleged Romanian Mafia, Bently pulled out. My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter. I saw one on the F4 so they did sell one.Those were a Polish Fiat 500 updated Just rubbish. There was a guy that was racing a Yugo in SCCA competition, but thats been a long time ago. Then again, Ive always had a liking for the odd car or two over the years. One of a kind, Im sure, There is an article from 2012, quoting the Time magazine Audis have been headaches to owners at various times. (https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jan/14/cover/#) Why are there so many Yugo in this movie? I have often wondered why Bricklin didnt try to make a ploy for the tooling to be set up in a higher quality shop. Dispose of the rest of the car. But before Bricklin made a virtue of safety, he all but made a mockery of same just a half decade before. Here, it is well known that you change the timing belt every 40K miles. Old joke. 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. The U.S. market with some minor tweaks the fact that these things were in! Italians could design a car designed ( and abandoned ) by Fiat before. 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