- Collectors will often buy a car and stash it away; rarely, though, does that happen with a car like this.
- The Yugo was famously cheap when new, with an advertised starting price of $3990.
- This one has just 121 miles on the odometer and belonged to a friend of Malcolm Bricklin, the Yugo importer.
The collector-car world is filled with all types of blue-chip sure bets, but the way traffic looked in the past isn’t well represented by what you might find on the lawn at Pebble Beach today. Instead, the roads of the past were filled with plainer cars, most of which don’t survive the erosion of time.
However, a special example of a very ordinary little car has just turned up on Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos). It’s a 1986 Yugo GT with only 121 miles on the odometer. You have to have a sense of humor to keep a collector-grade Yugo around, and in this case, the previous owner clearly did, as he was the producer behind such screwball comedies as the second Ace Ventura movie and Major League II.
Baltimore’s James G. Robinson founded Morgan Creek Entertainment, running it as a successful movie production company for decades. Not every movie it made was Oscar-winning material, but there were plenty of hits along the way. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was something of a pincushion for critical arrows, but it ended up as the second-highest-grossing movie of 1991.
Robinson died earlier this year, having amassed a collection of more than 100 cars, some of them obviously collector grade, like a Mercedes 300SL roadster. Among such vaunted company, this little Yugo might have seemed like a donkey in a barn full of thoroughbreds, but it has a pretty special story of its own.
Along with his Hollywood work, Robinson was also involved in the automotive trade, prepping imported cars after shipment from Europe, and even installing U.S.-grade air conditioning systems. His company processed many of the imported Yugos, and he was friends with the importer Malcolm Bricklin.
Like a movie panned by the critics, the Yugo was derided as cheap and disposable and was often the butt of jokes. Really, it offered honest, if basic, transportation for not much money. Based on the Fiat 128, it was produced in Yugoslavia by the former arms manufacturer Zastava and brought to the U.S. market in 1985 by Bricklin, who also gets credit for introducing Subaru to America.
Featuring a simple and practical hatchback layout, this Yugo GV comes with a 1.1-liter four-cylinder engine good for just 55 horsepower. The layout is fairly bare-bones, but you do get a cassette deck, air conditioning, and a roof rack. This Yugo also runs disc brakes up front and 13-inch wheels at each corner.
More than 140,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S., with nearly 800,000 in total global production. Though the car was never a critical hit, those figures nonetheless make this little hatchback a commercial success. Like the films Mr. Robinson produced, it was a crowd pleaser.
Such a clean, low-mileage example with a great connection to the Yugo story is something that probably belongs in a museum. However, the cost of entry is likely to be low enough that the car could be driven sparingly and displayed at the odd car show. It may never get past the velvet rope for the Pebble Beach Concours, but show up at next year’s Monterey Car Week in a Yugo this pristine, and heads will turn.
The auction ends on November 17.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.
Source: www.caranddriver.com
