Whipped Cream Difficulties

Quick thoughts on Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History:

1. This is almost as much a biography of Malcolm Bricklin as it is a history of the Yugo. I’ve hung around with enough car people to have heard of Bricklin, but not at the level of detail Vuic provides. One might say that Bricklin is a “colorful” character. One might also say that some of his business dealings pre-Yugo, Yugo, and post-Yugo, were…well, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, let’s just say “a touch irregular”.
2. Vuic makes an interesting argument that the Yugo wasn’t actually that bad a car. The short summary of his reasoning is: it was sold in the United States, therefore, it wasn’t that bad. A more elaborate summary of Vuic’s reasoning is that any car sold in the U.S. has to meet a certain minimum set of Federal standards; any car that can meet those standards is, almost by definition, not that bad a car. He goes on to argue that the Subaru 360 (a car I’d never heard of, but I was three years old when Subaru started importing it) is actually a much worse car. (I think Vuic undercuts his argument when he points out that the 360 was not sold as a car; it was actually sold as a “covered motorcycle” to get around U.S. safety standards. And guess who imported the 360 into the U.S.? Bricklin.)
3. Vuic also manages to make Yugoslavian geopolitics somewhat interesting.
4. He has a good sampling of Yugo jokes.
5. And his endnotes show that he did his homework; he’s got citations to things like Composite World magazine and biographies of obscure Canadian (wait, is “obscure Canadian” redundant?) politicians. Reading the endnotes, I often found myself wondering, “Where did he dig that up?”

I was expecting, based on the reviews and excerpts I’d read online, that this would be at least a halfway decent book. The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History is much better than that. I’d recommend it to any auto buff. (You can get it on the Kindle, by the way.)