Just finished Drowning Mona and came here for background. I was worried that shed make it. Drowning Mona (2000) is a never remembered black comedy that I absolutely love. 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. document.getElementById("unic-gdpr").style.display = 'inline'; or all of the Ladas.As has been mentioned already this kind of cheap car ownership But the proof of the pudding is the tasting; and I have YET to see a government-built car, or other product or service, which could stand head to heat with private competionstand on MERIT. Bricklin is still nominally involved with a venture called Visionary Vehicles and appears on its website today.The end of his Yugo adventure left him short of funds to repay an impressive list of creditors, investors and employees and even the IRS took its pound of flesh later on. I had two of them. Soon we would have a whole line of Adams Family cars on the road! So, they set about seeing what was what with a road-trip around Romania in three cars they would be testing. They were not standing still, by any means. Yugos are cars. First of all, thanks to Perry Shoar for a very well written explanation of the events of the 70s and 80s that led to the meltdown of Yugoslavia. if (window['UnicI'].geo === 'CA') { Ive always had a soft spot for these little cars from Yugoslavia. Not too long before I sold it, it had started to develop noisy CV joints, but by then the car was 8 years old and 100,000 miles. And if it WAS done, thats $500 WASTED. In the end, its poor management. At the very least, Bricklin didnt end up in a hotel room trying to arrange drug deals. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . Actually, Yugos timing belt is ~10$, and pretty easy to change. 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 . Danny DeVito and Neve Campbell appeared together again six years after the release of this film in another comedy "Relative Strangers "(2006). What a story! Dispose of the rest of the car. 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. I test drove one of these brand new when they hit the market. Bricklin was kicked out in the first (of two) bankruptcies, true. The body and car belonging to Kiely Rodni, a missing 16-year-old girl, may have been found in a Califronia lake on Sunday, according to a search and rescue group. Your email address will not be published. They start, get you to your destination in the dry, and thats about all you can saytheres no enjoyment in operating it and build quality was a joke. Initially, I had my eyes set on a mid 80s Toyota Celica as the cheapest car I could find. Early oil changes, followed maintenance schedule. By May of 1988, Malcom Bricklin needed a lifeboat and he found it on Wall Street. The interior was fading right from day one. Childrens toys are more dependable. So on the line, a worker would have to cut and install and tape it, with about a 25 percent failure rateincorrectly re-connected. Had Bricklin been a true industrialist instead of a con-man, the winning idea might have been to buy out the Yugo tooling (Zastava was setting up for the Florida at the time, they might have been open to this) and moved the whole plant to a place where workmen were conscientious and quality control accepted. But it needed even more tweaking than did the Jugo 45which is what the Yugo was based on. Down shifting was scary, sometimes you just had to bypass second, sometimes it refused to even go into gear or it would get stuck in gear. Not having that one bit Clarkson divised a solution, buying a third-hand Yugo and for the rest of the episode refering to it as a Bently. The car itself staggered on until early 1992, with steadily declining sales and a dealer network that was slowly (and then quickly) going bankrupt. About two years ago there was a Wall Street Journal article about a guy who drag races a Yugo. I remember checking them out back in I think 1986 at a local dealer and loved that bright blue they were offering at the time, called Adriatic Blue. It broke down like a Yugo. Or maybe not. Two YUGO watches, new. Rather, I see him as an irrepressible optimist who went into his various ventures believing everything would turn out well and he was blind to the shortcomings of the cars he imported. Enterior wall panels were thin cardboard with painted on carpet flecks. Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik had an interesting take on it lately; Other than the time the clutch cable broke, and getting the electrical issues sorted out, the car spent no time in the shop. For my family and me back in the eighties, fuel economy was king, so I drove K-Cars and assorted used vehicles that were cheap we never really struggled, but cash and monetary resources were scarce, hence my missing out on the larger, more deluxe offerings of GM, Ford and Chrysler. The last Yugo that we would recognize rolled off the assembly line in November 2008. The place where I used to work was given a Yugo 45. The car was a modest success with just under 8000 sold in the first year, but when the 360 was pilloried by Consumer Reports as being unacceptable because of its numerous safety issues, the bottom dropped out of the venture and the last few cars sat on dealers lots for years before they were practically given away. With the pullout of Fiat, Renault and the British makes just a few years before, there was a general sense that room existed in the market for any european nameplate that could build a reasonably priced car that returned good fuel economy and high build quality. I have only seen one Yugo in my life. As it turns out, the same rental car place was STILL selling surplus Yugos, and I bought a blue one this time. From the Subaru 360, to the SV1, to the Yugo, up to Chery, he followed the time-honored scammers credo of taking as much money as he could through charm and charisma, and when the going got tough and his shell-game started coming unraveled, he bailed with his loot and moved on to his next scam. The Yugo got its biggest role in 2000, in Drowning Mona, starring Casey Affleck, Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Danny DeVito, and Bette Midler, with Will Farrell making a delightful cameo. 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. Its essentially a Fiat, and the same thing applied to them. I initially got a job selling cars, and had access to one for a while. Ladas were, and are, shite. if(document.getElementById("unic-ccpa")) { American Brands: AMC, Jeep and All Others, Tractors, Lawn Mowers, Off-Road Equipment, Automotive History The Jokes On U.S.- The Short, Wild Ride Of The Yugo In America, TOAL:1974(?) A girl I hung out with in college had a Yugo. But is an Audi as bad as a Yugo? I wonder if he actually carried that threat out, and if his daughter ever forgave him if he did. So, with connections, he was brought to Japan for a series of lectures; and if America wasnt interested, Japan was very much so. The worst of the Japaneese cars would rust in structural places that would make the car unsafe. I guess the major issue in my favor was the relatively inexpensive parts when I did need them, and the fact that Georgia is semi-arid, so no rust issues. Renault has been in state ownership since the 50s, and has been a very profitable company. } And when longtime resident Mona Dearly (BETTE MIDLER) drove her Yugo into the river to her death, no one really seemed to care. There are, to be fair, other theories about how Jeff (Marcus Thomas) lost his hand, although in every scenario he was reaching for a beer. As the movie opens, a local woman named Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) speeds down a country road and directly into the Hudson River when her brakes fail. I have often wondered why Bricklin didnt try to make a ploy for the tooling to be set up in a higher quality shop. 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. In addition, many cars have changed hands by that timeand who knows what the previous owner may have had done? The Renault Alliance and 18i were still being sold in 1984-85 when the Yugo debuted. Even those of us raised on rusting U.S. cars from the 60s were surprised by how fast the Japaneese stuff vaporized. Also, the GM Colonades from 73-77 were pretty rust resistant as well. The faded red one in the piece is for sale- $750. Drowning Mona Trailer - Yugo Cars 7,448 views May 7, 2014 The NZ Yugo 1.66K subscribers 26 Dislike Share In Drowning Mona everyone drives Yugo Cars and one day Mona borrows her sons. And the opening of China and competition from S Korea in a way ate Yugos lunch in the global market. Could not resist seeing what a piece of crap would look like with no tin on the top. The space efficiency was great too- it really is tiny- and is NOT a fiat. Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons. She does figure in a quiet little in-joke. This article, like many here, evoked some fond memories. The result is that the UK Yugo was a far superior car to the US one, with its dealership network out to make a quick buck. I know there were folks who collected Yugos for nothing, for running and parts cars. The Little SuBARu Wow!, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLPp-NFInXw. 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. Destination was Las Vegas; and by the time I got there the only way to get it to move was in First. var readyGEO; Also, I think that first step after buying any used car in general should be changing of belt. They took in much more foreign revenue and as the economy began to fail more and more fundamentally, the leaders of those republics decided theyd be better off independent of Yugo. The Yugo was not always viewed so favorably, although its $3,990 price ($9,900 in today's dollars) grabbed headlines on its introduction in 1985. I ask because I wanted to make a comment in the article about the C3 Audi 100/Audi 5000 about how much of a disaster my fathers ownership experience turned out to be, but I figured itd make an interesting point of comparison. So whats my point? The man is Malcom Bricklin. The class all came out to look at it in the parking lot, Yugo was an exercise in marketing magic, and an exercise in embarrassment. Of course, being that these cars were manual transmissioned cars, Im sure they didnt rented out nearly as much as the Ford Escorts and Hyundais that had automatics. Not sure they sold very many. Required fields are marked *. Possibly most accurate and realistic analysis I have heard yet regarding what happened in ex-Yugoslavia. Two Yugo episodes: The first while working on a construction crew in the 1987-88 period, at a project west of Rochester, NY one morning a Yugo rolls onto the lot, out pops a nervous, typical pocket-protector young engineering type, tells us he is out of gas, could anyone give him a ride to his job.at Kodak! Ive been toying with seeing if I can find one thats been stored in a garage somewhere and buying it to replace my aging truck that leaks oil and coolant and tide the time before I can buy the new Fiat 500. I wonder why they used the Yugos, To show the towns Quirkyness? After the wars, Zastava redesigned their cars with help from Fiat and Citroen, and gained new technologies to have them compete with other European cars. With the pullout of Fiat, Renault and the British makes just a few years before,. It would take about eight years from apparent problem to engineered fix to failure of the fix and another engineered solution. It has been a while since I have seen a Yugo on the road, but a local car wash has one with signs mounted on it. I assume some were worse than others, but Ive heard this complaint levied against such a broad range of cars (American, Japanese, Italian, British, even German) of that era that I have to wonder if there was some sort of fire sale on water-soluble steel. Dont forget, we had the Czech Skoda Estelle, the Russian Lada and the Polish FSO 125p all competing at the bottom of the market. I have NEVER burned out a clutchexcept on a Yugo. -You know why Yugo drivers go to heaven? As the pride of Serbo-Croatia hit the streets of America, reports of slipshod assembly began flooding back to the companys Upper Saddle River , New Jersey headquarters. And this works both ways after war ended in ex. Holy mackerel, Goe, what a story and experience! 459 tweaks (and 18 months) later, the Yugo was almost ready for launch. -Because they have already been through hell. To be said, Jasons book is 90% about Bricklin. When the coroner first jumps into the water to check Mona's dead body, he is neck-deep in water. Yugo Cars in Drowning Mona 4,507 views May 7, 2014 19 Dislike Share Save The NZ Yugo 1.65K subscribers Oh such a crack up movie and it involves my favorite thing YUGOS! Having had some up-close contact with a 128, Id say that its more 128 than 127. Drowning Mona is basically a comic murder-mystery. In Spain it was called "Todos la queran muerta" (everyone wanted her dead), Too good of a movie not to be on this site in HD. The Yugos are a literal running joke throughout the movie. Mona, played by Midler, drowns when the brakes in her Yugo fail and she catapults through a guardrail into the lake below. Im pretty sure that she kept her clothes on. The country was communist, but with good relations with the US and a cosmetically overhauled version of socialism, the idea was the Yugoslavia would compete in Western markets and as a result, the country took on a lot of debt throughout the 70s to update its capacity for making consumer goods, among other projects. They initially started out as an arms manufacturer. Because he SAYS he has a new belt on there, doesnt mean its so. 3) The Yugo has a good reputation in the land of its birth. Yugoslavia was in the state of bankruptcy at that time, import of all goods and raw materials was practically halted. An older Yugo, since the car hasn't been manufactured since its country went out of business. 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.. Rona Mace (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an anagram for "a romance". Introduced at an offer price of just under $1300 , the little Subaru made much of its over 60 MPG fuel economy and low cost of ownership. I think we need to re-evaluate the Yugo against 1986 standards instead of 2011 standards. The displacement limit for kei cars was increased to 550cc some years ago. @ahight: I think there is no need to put the location square in every screenshot, only the ones with more than a single car visible. It's got an absolute star studded cast including Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Casey Affleck, William Fitchner, Neve Campbell, Jaime Lee Curtis, with a cameo, and even . What I know is that people explain such quality failures as Zastavas being due to a different culture in worker managed firms, etc. Agree with this last. Finallywith a new clutch 400 miles oldit tossed the alternator belt. But the little Yugo turned out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. An automatic wouldnt fit in the Yugo engine bay, so the only thing shiftless about the Yugo would be the Zastava workers that routinely drank on the job. These rear engined devices were a blast to drive, with tail-out shenanigans a-la Porsche 911 being easy to emulate. Handling is sharp and the engine loves to rev. To this day I have never felt a more imprecise,balky shifter. What am I supposed to make outta that? I saw one parked on Colorado Blvd. Ever notice how a lot of movie smokers seem to have just lighted their cigarettes? Dubrovnik is kind of old fashion place with somewhat stricter rules about dressing on the beaches and elsewhere. } The last ones left in my hometown got a stay of execution when the city received a good number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s; many of them bought Yugos and got mobile for next to nothing since they knew how to keep them running. Her brake lines had been cut. Zastava only collapsed in 2008, and its decline was NOT due to mismanagement, but the trade embargo on Serbia, which starved them of devlopment funds. After Mona Dearly (Bette Milder) dies in the movie's opening moments when her Yugo plows through a guardrail and into the Hudson River far below, Wyatt begins investigating her death. i cant imagine where bricklin would get the approximately $35k/mo rent. It was a much more reliable and simple design than the 128 engine in States bound Yugos. It is the cheapest person that spends the most. Hell, I was 20 years younger, A lot can change in that time. The steel is much thicker than Fiat used, and although fit and finish wasnt great, it was no worse than on a Fiat. I owned two. Any idea where the Fiat 128 stopped and the 127 started in the Yugo? I also started using Restore engine treatment, and that took care of that issue. It turns out to be murder and Chief Wyatt Rash (DeVito) must investigate. The 360 was a Kei car, which took advantage of reduced taxes and insurance rates in Japan for cars less than three meters long with engines no more than 360cc in displacement. The "Fetzer valve", when Lucinda the mechanic is giving the Sheriff her findings about Mona's car, she says the "Fetzer valve" had been punctured. The interior squeaked everywhere that it didnt rattle. They probably would have found a customer base in the U.S. Barnum and the circus freak show that he brought to America in the twilight of the Reagan years. Motor Trend reported that their hand picked press ringer broke down during testing. She picked them up for virtually nothing and was content with bare-bones transportation. 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. 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