The Yugo Has Yugone To A New, Better Home With An Autopian Member

While there are as many different types of car geeks and hoarders/collectors out there as there are iridescent colors in a puddle of motor oil, but I think you can generally lump them into one of two camps: those that hold on to cars forever, even beyond reason, and those that cycle through cars on some sort of arcane cycle. I’m usually the first, and as a result, my property is littered with cars, running, and, far too often, otherwise.

One of these cars in the latter category was my 1991 Yugo GVplus. I’m very fond of this car, and I’ve absolutely enjoyed my time with it, but I need to be realistic – I have too many project cars that need attention and far, far too little time to devote to them. And that aorta business set me back a bit, too, I suppose. And maybe I have my eye on getting something else and I need to make room.

Point is, these cars deserve better custodians than I have been, so sometimes it makes sense to re-home them to people who can take care of them.

And that’s what happened this weekend. The Yugo is off to a new chapter in its exciting life, and, even better, this is a good reminder of some of the more unexpected benefits of Autopian Membership.

See that happy man and his delighted daughter, delirious about the prospect of Yugo ownership ? That’s Brandon, and he’s the new custodian of the Yugo. How did Brandon get so lucky? Did he save an entire nations’ children in a past life? Maybe, I haven’t checked. What I do know is that he was an Autopian Member who was reeling from the pain of losing a car auction, and our publisher, Matt, took pity upon him, and sought to make the pain go away, via a Yugo:

Sure, that Autozam Carol was pretty cool, but our man here would have been out four grand had he actually won, and who knows what issues that car is hiding? With the Yugo, all the issues are proudly on display.

Now, you may be wondering why the hell Matt is just volunteering to give away cars he doesn’t own, and that’s a valid question. It’s not really something one should be in the habit of doing. But, in this case, it was okay, because I had originally wanted to give the Yugo away in some sort of raffle for members, but something about California’s sweepstakes laws made that illegal.

Illegal? To give away a Yugo? What kind of backwards-ass madness is this?

Anyway, it’s apparently just fine to give away a car if it’s just done at random, without a formal announcement or anything like that, so that’s what happened: one day, in the Autopian Discord (which is another huge member perk, by the way) Matt felt bad for a member who lost a car auction and gifted them a Yugo. My Yugo.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that becoming a member will mean you’ll get a car, of course. But I can say that, at least once, it’s happened.

The history of this particular Yugo is quite storied; I suspect that after being sold as someone’s cheap daily driver, it spent some time as a practice car in some auto shop class. There’s some evidence of strange things being done to it.

Then, well-known car-rescuer and YouTuber Tavarish acquired the car, and he gave it, as a joke, to Mike Ballaban at Jalopnik. Mike was a great custodian of the Yugo, keeping it as his only car in New York City. It was during this time he loaned it to me so I could make this video defending the Yugo and all of its unfairly-maligned siblings:

This may be when I fell for the little Yugoslav, too, I think. It had so much plucky charm! I think Mike could sense my fondness for it, so when he had a kid and got an ultimatum that the Yugo must go, for the child’s sake, he reached out to me.

He gave me the car, and I drove it down from New York to North Carolina, with surprisingly little drama. Since then, the Yugo and I have had a lot of good times!

I took my kid around in the Yugo a lot, which, ironically, was the main reason the Yugo was banished from its previous home, the fear of a child having to encounter it. But we had fun! At 67 hp, it was one of my more powerful cars, and proved to be a lot of fun to throw around! It was far more entertaining than any little bottom-tier crapbox from a now-nonexistent country should have any right to be.

I took it to multiple local car shows and events, including the local Triangle Rad shows, where it rocked an Atari:

(Also note the 3D-printed badge on the nose that I customized to be a little torch)

…and I even took it to some shows that allowed it to co-mingle with peers of equal stature:

I took it on a few road trips, including one where I got to perform my single finest act of road-side desperation-repair:

On the way home from the zoo, the Yugo decided that trouble-free operation felt too weird so the shift linkage vanished. I bodged up a fix with 2 hose clamps and a rock and we made it home. pic.twitter.com/25PWyfq4fn

— Jason Torchinsky (@JasonTorchinsky) November 27, 2021

Yes, I fixed the shift linkage with two hose clamps and a rock. And I think that’s still what’s allowing the car to shift now. I did suggest that perhaps Brandon should order a new Zastava NOS factory-correct repair kit, consisting of two new hose clamps and a factory-approved rock:

Close: pic.twitter.com/X4JVJ28Tse

— Peter (@Peter_M_V) November 29, 2021

I had good times with the Yugo, but it had been sitting for far, far too long, and needed more attention than I could give. So, I was happy to see it go to Brandon. Of course, getting it out of the driveway and onto the tow dolly proved a colossal ass-pain, with the expected fiascos that doing anything with me around seems to produce.

First, I got my pollen-covered truck stuck in a ditch by my house:

Thankfully, Brandon’s friend with a nice, newer F-150 towed me out, though in that process we broke one of my tow straps. No matter! I had another, which we used to yank the Yugo out of its gravel nest!

Well, we tried, but that strap broke, too, so we had to resort to using some much shorter chains:

These worked, but the willfully non-straight driveway meant that the short chains ended up causing a situation where a chunk of the Yugo’s quite brittle plastic bumper got lopped off:

The F-150 was fine, so that was good, at least. After a lot of moving and use of a protractor to calculate angles, we did manage to get the Yugo out of the driveway, and onto the tow dolly, but to pull that off, we had to use my truck as a combination anchor and tow vehicle, because the Yugo’s brakes weren’t, um, up to the challenge gravity and an incline provided.

This meant this strange tug-of-war-looking situation like you see here:

Eventually, it did all work! The Yugo was on the dolly and ready to begin its new life!

Well, sort of. Being a Yugo, it can’t let anything happen that easily, as one of the rear tires merged with the infinite 25 miles from Brandon’s home:

This is really not the Yugo’s fault, of course. Just old tires that desperately needed replacing. After a quick swap of the shredded rubber for a marginally better one from the front, the Yugo completed the last leg of the trip.

It’s now safely in Brandon’s garage, and hopefully will be back out on the road again in no time, its 67 Eastern Bloc horses once again running happy and free, bringing perverse joy to all those who encounter it.

Good luck, Brandon! Keep us updated! Enjoy your next chapter of life, Yugo!