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Comment by DonaldFisk | Hacker News Reader

If the Yugo was as bad as the joke suggests, how did so many of them outlast the country they were built in?

I bought my Yugo for 200 euros when I turned 18. It breaks down constantly and if I don't turn it on daily during winter then I have to get a jumpstart, but getting it fixed up costs basically nothing, and it runs on a bottle of LPG which costs nothing compared to actual petrol. It's truly got that ex-yugo charm to it, what's not to love about the hunk of junk?

If there are no other cars, people make them last. They are simple so easy to repair. They don't have many parts, so not much can break.

You're implying that ex Yugoslavia had just one make of car available - which is not really true.

In the 1980 there were plenty of variations of Zastavas, Yugos, Fiats, Ladas, VW, Trabants, Citroens, Skodas, Varburgs, Renaults, Opels around.

While Yugo was certainly popular enough because it was supposed to be really cheap, I think I used to see a lot more Fiat 500s and Zastava 101 around back in the days. Yugo is just known more internationally because it was actually exported to the US.

There was a variety of foreign cars, but the domestic ones had a lot of volume and were built simply and for more basic conditions. Fićo [1] being super widespread, with people sometimes owning several so they could use them as donor cars. They had underpowered, air-cooled engines, but they had a killer first gear that I remember could pull off climbs that no other car could at the time.

The thing I remember about Fićo was its poor gearbox, where sometimes you had to hold it in gear to catch, and constant synchronizer failures. I also remember the Stojadin had a butter-smooth shifter that allegedly was a Porsche design :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zastava_750

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