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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2010
On Sale: March 2, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 0809098911
EAN: 9780809098910
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 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.
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