Gyrobob wrote on 12/15/11 at 07:04:59:OF, I do get a kick out of your Yugo/bill67 linkage.
Yes, the Yugo was a miserable failure here. The car, though, did have some challenges just to its very existence that no other cars had to overcome.
It started off as a Fiat 127, a reasonable and inexpensive little car for the masses, made in Italy (hence the quality problems), but if you got one that had everything screwed together properly, it worked fine and was reliable. Fiats are just Fiats. Get a good one and they are great.
-- The 127 worked as well and held together as well as US-made competitors (Vega, Chevette, Escort, Fiesta, Pinto etc.) in the 80's.
When Fiat stopped making the 127, the tools to make it ended up in Yugoslavia. With Malcom Bricklin's involvement (whole teams of engineers were sent there just to work quality issues, and for the US market, they created a special production line of elite assemblers that got lots more pay) the car was imported in the late 80s thru the early 90s.
The car was doomed from the start.
-- A good Italian design, but made by socialists with the communist manufacturing attitude (just fill the quota for today and go home, comrade)
-- The design was somewhat outdated when the Italians made it, and became more and more obsolete in the 90s.
-- The car was made by Zastava, a large and old company in Yugoslavia.
--- The United Nations placed sanctions on Yugoslavia in the 90s the restricted manufacturing/export, leaving US dealers with dwindling inventory.
--- This got a lot worse when NATO bombed the factory by mistake, thinking it was a gun factory.
-- With no way to produce more than a few thousand cars annually, the company folded in the early 90s
If they would have been given an even break, they might have survived. Who knows? They did have a few advantages -- they cost a lot less than their competition because labor was cheap, and the gov't subsidized them.
I beg to difffer. Check items marked in red. We developed our own tools. Engine was ours. Italians gave us nothing, nor we asked for it. That explains even WORSE quality than Italian. Yugo started for Yugoslav market, not US. Only later we tried to export. Zastava small arms factory and Zastava Yugo factory are in the same compound. Allways been. Bombing was not a mistake.
Everything else is right and proper!
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