With the departure of Fiat, auto entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin saw an opportunity. Bricklin had brought the Subaru 360, “the Catarina,” to the United States, a car that Consumer Reports called “unacceptable.” La Catarina failed, but Subaru of America survived. In the mid-1970s, Bricklin created the Bricklin SV-1, a gull-wing door sports car whose design was a harbinger of the DeLorean. It was also a failure. This time, Bricklin imported two sports cars from Fiat, the X1 / 9 and the 124 Spider, which he renamed the Bertone X1 / 9 and the Pininfarina 124 Spider. That did not solve the oxidation problems.
According to Bricklin, Pininfarina terminated its contract with him as part of a deal to make the Allanté Pininfarina for Cadillac, thus missing a car from the promise it had made to the dealers. “So I put someone in charge of finding the cheapest car in the world,” he told a roundtable in 2013.
They found him in Yugoslavia. Bricklin went and stumbled upon “that crap factory with 50,000 people, which should have had 2,000, and 127 communist unions,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, but that’s funny, huh?’
However, the Yugo was going to face a nemesis far more formidable than communism: Jay Leno.
“I always have the feeling that Jay Leno himself killed the car,” Moskowitz said. “Nobody wants to own a car that is a joke.”
A dogma of the faithful is that the car would have been successful if it had not been for those jokes, inevitable in Leno’s routines on the show Tonight Show, as a frequent guest in the early 1980s. “Leno did untold damage to my business and to the owners of the Yugos,” said Pierce.
“The Yugo has released a very nifty anti-theft device,” read a joke from Leno. “They made his name bigger.”
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