drowning mona yugo cars

I've owned so many other cars so why not? } It turns out to be murder and Chief Wyatt Rash (DeVito) must investigate. NO. First, salt as a melting agent on roads was relatively new. It was a nightmare. Actually, from my experience with Yugo monocoque, four doors would have crushing effect on rigidity:). I recall A caddy dealer in the Cleveland area who gave away a free Yugo with the purchase of a Cadillac! Drowning Mona (2000) is a never remembered black comedy that I absolutely love. He was a priest for several small parishes in the mountains of a N. Eastern state, I forget which and came around a bend to get from one parish to another when he hit the poor animal and it was enough to total that car out but he got that many miles out of it. Likewise the Toyotas and Datsuns. Around the same time we had a similar thing in Australia the FSM Niki, which was a Polish-built Fiat 126, so a ~700cc rear-engined s-box. I mean, cmon, its an Eastern Bloc car. i found this article about the space: Mine was still only about a year old, so I was in denial about its performance. Second occurred during 1994-95, having changed employment by then, while driving the 50+ miles each morning, Id notice Yugos of different colors pass me on the four lane driven by the same fellow. In my Country was make an attempt to import the Yugo Cabrio,rebadged as Innocenti Koral Cabrio,but homologation fiche wasn't approved for Italy,but if car was tested by Italian motor magazines(Italy will import Yugos twice,1986 to 1987 with origin name Zastava Yugo and 1990 to 1992 as Innocenti Koral 45 and 55--that rebadged for our Country), I like this movie. Let me disillusion youI busted a piston crown and bent a valve badly enough to freeze up the camshaft. The biggest thing Ive heard was the timing belts were supposedly good for 30K miles and many owners were caught off guard, mostly due to not reading and/or heeding the maintenance intervals and boom, they croaked as they were not non interference motors like most OHC motors arent. This car had one genuine asset: ride quality. W. Edwards Deming was key in Japans metamorphosis from a backwards exporter of trinkets and junk to a source for amazingly-high-quality automobiles and electronics. I took all of the fun stuff off of the red one (Italian Cromodora wheels and the AM/FM Cassette) and put it on the blue one. Worse, it was not just fenders and rocker panels that looked bad but did not affect the way the car drove. A few things come to mind regarding the Yugo / Zastava Koral (and larger Yugo / Zastava Skala), mainly that it is a pity it never received similar developments such as 5-door hatchback, 2/4-door saloon and 3/5-door estate bodystyles as found on other Fiat 127-based variants like the SEAT 127 / SEAT Frua and Fiat 147 / Fiat Oggi / Fiat Panorama, along with larger 1372-1596cc+ versions of the Fiat SOHC engine. I owned one. Further, it was the only small car of the era that could be genuinely fun to drive. Modern kei cars are dimensionally similar to the old sidevalve english Fords tall and narrow hopefully they dont fall over as easily I see lots of elderly people driving used import keis here. That brochures more collectible than its car. Competing econoboxes included the Chevy Chevette,. Retrospective - 2000's "Drowning Mona". The New Brunswick government pulled the plug in September of 1975 and the Bricklin was finished. Someone wanted her dead. Drowning Mona | 2000 | PG-13 | - 5.5.5. Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons. Me and my friend Jerry (from Sam Bonds) drove a Yugo at a wrecker yard in Coburg some years back. It really has all of the benefits of an Italian car with none of the drawbacks. And as any living myth, this one spreads into other areas as well: An automatic wouldnt fit in the Yugo engine bay, so the only thing shiftless about the Yugo would be the Zastava workers that routinely drank on the job. Which, actually, was a very good little car . Danny DeVito and Neve Campbell appeared together again six years after the release of this film in another comedy "Relative Strangers "(2006). Theyre really a mishmash of the two; with their own unique body. Ironically, if he had stuck it out with Subaru for the long haul, he might have done a whole lot better for himself. Now that its privatized, products have risen in quality to what the buyer expects for his money. She claimed that once you knew and understood them, they were not bad cars for what they were. Various ancillaries like alternators were replaced with real FIAT parts. They were an object lesson in the old adage that you get what you pay for. But they did. These are the kinds of people who don't like to be thrown out of bars because it's a loss of valuable drinking time. Audis have been headaches to owners at various times. IIRC, they licensed Fiat designs in the mid 50s and in 2008 they signed a Memorandum of Understanding to buy the auto assembly plant from Zastava. Also, the GM Colonades from 73-77 were pretty rust resistant as well. If youre familiar with the descent of that once-vaunted company into its current sorry state, appears as if they had too many of this type in management. This article, like many here, evoked some fond memories. We heard of the Yugo here far away in South Africa, but now I know how it all came about and fell apart. As the movie opens, a local woman named Mona Dearly ( Bette Midler) speeds down a country road and directly into the Hudson River when her brakes fail. It is a measure of the local intelligence that when the car and driver are dragged to shore some hours later, the doctor checks her pulse. Very entertaining. The Yugo, new clutch, new exhaust, patched wiring and all, went into the trash. She put about 50,000 miles on it without a problem-it was scrapped when she got rear-ended by a Camry. Japanese cars generally started out small, usually around 800cc in the mid 1950s and grew with the prosperity of the country and desire to chase export markets. i doubt they are still there. Source for information on Drowning Mona: VideoHound's Golden Movie . Nevermind that their cars are horribly unreliable, people still buy them. I must admit that I own a Yugo. i cant imagine where bricklin would get the approximately $35k/mo rent. (* 5-20 for older cars, up to 200 if they have to change water-pump and rollers, new models are more expensive, but 500 maybe for new BMW). Another factor was that Subaru managed to kick Bricklin out on the street and take over distribution and marketing before he ran it into the ground. Could not resist seeing what a piece of crap would look like with no tin on the top. Ive been toying with seeing if I can find one thats been stored in a garage somewhere and buying it to replace my aging truck that leaks oil and coolant and tide the time before I can buy the new Fiat 500. (function waitGEO() { Critically, one of her co-workers loved Fiats, and he taught her their quirks-most of which the Yugo shared. At Zastava, these were foreign. The first thing to appear onscreen is a little blurb about the Yugo car company using the town of Verplanck as a test area for their new model years ago. There was a short in the headlights, and the switch for the engine cooling fan was broken both of which were easily fixed. Do not sell my data See production, box office & company info, Siskel & Ebert: Drowning Mona/My Dog Skip/What Planet Are You From?/The Next Best Thing/Miss Julie. When a woman drives a car into the river to her death, everyone in town becomes a suspect. The last ones left in my hometown got a stay of execution when the city received a good number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s; many of them bought Yugos and got mobile for next to nothing since they knew how to keep them running. Why did so many Fiat designs get recycled and built behind the Iron Curtain? Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) is an anagram for "only a dream". I think I remember this! But youre right that would mean being a business man and not a con-artist. But with enough TLC (something the average American consumer wasnt high on), maybe they werent so bad (at least a few of them, anyway). I also bought a new Yugo in 1989, and had to replace brake master cylinder immediately because brakes would fail after about 10 km on the road. Drowning Mona is a 2000 American crime comedy film starring Danny DeVito as Wyatt Rash, a local police chief from Verplanck, New York, who investigates the mysterious death of Mona Dearly ( Bette Midler ), a spiteful, hard-drinking, loud-mouthed, abusive woman, hated by all who knew her, who drove her son's car off a cliff and drowned in a river. Im guessing the sport badging is why the decimal point is so far to the right? Before I moved to Atlanta in the early 90s, we sold off our other cars before moving. Our Mr. Bricklin also had an idea to start up another company fed by Zastava, this time to be called ZMW. Dont forget, we had the Czech Skoda Estelle, the Russian Lada and the Polish FSO 125p all competing at the bottom of the market. During the time the clutch cable was dying, I broke the shifter mechanism, due to the clutch cable dying. Based on the slightly larger Fiat 125, it was everything bad about a lada, but somehow worse. Kei cars still exist, but the engine size and dimensional standards have been increased somewhat, and the newer Kei cars tend to be very tall, boxy affairs to create the maximum possible cubic footage of interior room within the package limits. Malcolm Bricklin was one of those guys who is the quintessential P.T. The car was a modest success with just under 8000 sold in the first year, but when the 360 was pilloried by Consumer Reports as being unacceptable because of its numerous safety issues, the bottom dropped out of the venture and the last few cars sat on dealers lots for years before they were practically given away. I blame the cost-cutters, whove put us in this positionspin the dice wrong, youre buying a new engine. Personally I would have gone for the Skoda. But like so much of his other stuff, the deal fell through. Now Rash has to decide who killed Mona Dearly. He regaled us with stories of his work at Yugo and claimed that the factory started to develop (or adapt) an automatic transmission for the market in the USA. A magazine road test came up with the amusing summary: Even here in the Land That Rust Forgot, I rarely see anything from the 70s. Possibly most accurate and realistic analysis I have heard yet regarding what happened in ex-Yugoslavia. Ive been around big rigs all of my life, but they never looked bigger than when I was next to them on the freeway. The two-door chassis is, I understand, a 127. @ahight: I think there is no need to put the location square in every screenshot, only the ones with more than a single car visible. By third world standards, the Yugo was not a terribly bad car and sales continued even after its mother country began breaking up in the early 90s. Nobody had let management know that the wiring harness as made, wasnt usable in that part of the car. Bricklin had formed Yugo of America to import the car and as was his custom, financial shenanigans were part of the mix. In fact, as it became evident that the Yugo was heading toward failure, Bricklin tried to modify and import the Proton from Malaysia to take advantage of low wage rates and favorable exchange valuations that would have made that car an asian version of the Yugo. Its the manifestation of the postwar Japanese industrial culturepredicated on continuous quality improvement; and with the use of statistical controls to produce ever-higher quality items with fewer deviations from specification. What kind of car is in the movie Drowning Mona? Thank you for the history, it complements the story of the car well. They didnt always start, and they DID always rust away. In a recent episode of Top Gear UK the trio were allegedly asked by an alleged high-ranking member of the alleged Romanian Mafia what would be the best luxury car for one of his stature. State-owned auto companies or assembly plants, tend to have little to no feedback from end-user to management. Since it had the potential to continue the well-regarded reputation of the Autobianchi A112 base car as a small model in markets like the US compared to the SWB Fiat 127 derived car that become the infamous half-baked small Yugo. The car itself staggered on until early 1992, with steadily declining sales and a dealer network that was slowly (and then quickly) going bankrupt. It was as if the Yugo was being promoted as crap, but SUPERIOR crap. And was thus more expensive. Yup, Im gonna go for a ride in my Ford Fester., I mentioned Drowning Mona below, before I read this. The interior squeaked everywhere that it didnt rattle. In regard to that old devil corrosion, an honest question: were there any cars of the seventies that DIDNT rust like mad? The collapse of Communism removed any perceived legitimacy left in the public who thought their future under capitalism would reflect a standard of living like W Germanys. "She's dead," he confirms to Chief Rash (Danny DeVito), who nods grimly and begins a murder investigation. (Eagleburger had been U.S. ambassador to Yugoslvia and had spent almost all of his foreign service career in southeast europe. During lunch the high schoolers came out and lifted it up so the front tires were up on the sidewalk. Privacy policy The film also stars Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, William Fichtner, Marcus Thomas, and Peter Dobson. He was scarred sh*tless and begging me to not make him drive it. Finallywith a new clutch 400 miles oldit tossed the alternator belt. With no new product in the pipeline, Bricklin would either have to find another car to flog or get an honest job, so there was a mutual meshing of interests when he arranged a visit to the Red Banner Factory in Yugoslavia that turned out the new apple of his eye in 1984. Joe Friday (Dan Aykroyd) had a gold one in the Dragnet movie. I saw it on the Helena streets quite a lot, but it was the only one in the city. The Mopar fuselage cars were not too bad, but the 71 on up B bodies were not so good. Generally what kills them is the cost of major systems repairs, to where its not economically justifiable. I know of no explanation for the garbage experience my dad had with his Audi, which broke down regularly. Why did Yugos have standard rear defrost? He lost his house, his fortuneAnd the dozens of Yugo GVs that he received as part of his settlement with his bankers. Yes, even a Saturn will rust in Detroit, but in less harsh climes, Yugos tend to last well. Since the film is set in modern, post y2k times, it may be the last one in running condition in the U.S. No, I dont know if they used an actual Yugo or just a skinned over FIAT prop, & if they did utilize a Yugo, how many production assistants were tasked with keeping it working ;-D. Also used for laughs in the Ackroyd/Hanks Dragnet movie. . The Yugo was a far superior car compared against a Chevette, or first generation Hyundai. (Cracked distributor cap, IIRC.) NEVER Give Up - NEVER Back Down Found it! They did not have such a bad reputation,at least not as bad as the rear engined Skodas Yugo gave everybody in town one to have. Learn how your comment data is processed. if (window['UnicI'] && window['UnicI'].geo && window['UnicI'].geo !== '-' ) { Maybe Bricklin had caught lightning in a bottle. Technically if its going downhill it wasnt moving on its own power. A revised constitution in the mid 70s turned the country into a loose confederation and as Croatia/Slovenia were more developed due to being part of Austria Hungary, there was only so much that approx thirty years of prosperity after WWII could reverse. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia was the finishing blow, but wasnt the reason it wasnt brought over. I see one maybe twice a year. As for the first gen Civics and to a lesser extent, the second gen Civics, I would guess where we dont have rust to deal with, it was 30+ years and many accrued miles that ultimately were their demise, ie, 200K-300K+ and a head gasket finally blows are what killed them off eventually if not an accident or some other mechanical failure due to age/mileage. They are also heavily used rather than background or minor action vehicles. I sold the car to a coworker of my BILs, who drove the car another three years before he totaled it. There was nothing inherently wrong with the 360, and all the other Japanese manufacturers had a car at the time with more or less similar features. Purchased one year old cars for less than $1500 while attending college. Todays story, though, has nothing to do with anybody like that. People who took care of some basic maintenance and corrosion protection could see 10 to 15 years of service without too much trouble. People's spotty memories and clumsy lies complicate the investigation, and the . Your experience was exactly what my suspicions were about these cars. To see mine riding on a tow truck was so humiliating. But the reason it hit the Japanese cars harderwas that while many American cars were still frame-on-platform, and had some beef in the underbellyand even the unibody models were over-engineered for rigiditythe Japanese models had pared weight and beef to a minimum. I assume some were worse than others, but Ive heard this complaint levied against such a broad range of cars (American, Japanese, Italian, British, even German) of that era that I have to wonder if there was some sort of fire sale on water-soluble steel. other small car offerings back then. She noted that while it wasnt much good past 65MPH (no overdrive), it never got less than 30MPG, and it handled beautifully. Some dinosaur relic, Id never seen before. At that time, Bricklin was probably best known for the eponymous car that he launched amidst much fanfare in 1974. So we come to the end of the Yugo saga in America. The 360 was a Kei car, which took advantage of reduced taxes and insurance rates in Japan for cars less than three meters long with engines no more than 360cc in displacement. I owned two. He drove them all fast and hard which no doubt shortened their operational life. document.getElementById("unic-gdpr").style.display = 'inline'; Unpaid claims included some warranty work done by dealers on Yugos before sales collapsed. Yep, the N and Z360 from Honda, but when they made them for export, they dropped in a 600cc motor into what was essentially the same car so what we got as did Europe was the N and Z600 with a 600cc motor instead of the 360cc motor, which was the utmost limit in displacement for a Kei car then, and I think now. It is a measure of the local intelligence that when the car and driver are dragged to shore some hours later, the doctor checks her pulse. And incompetence does not negate the political reasons, until and unless the failure of management becomes an unavoidable political embarrassment. These cars came with an optional AM/FM cassette deck that was very basic, only 5W total if I recall right, or was that 5W per channel? I actually grew to like winding the snot out of that motor. I knew about their reputation, but I really needed a set of wheels that wasnt going to set me back a couple of thousand dollars. I recall taking my younger brother out to teach him how to drive. I did appreciate the way Yugo could make one part do what a western car needed three for. In the moviedrowning MonaI remember there was among the many regular Yugos one that had four doors (a black one).Was it It is my understanding the latter Yugos were much better than their earlier counterparts, but still not up to snuff with the worst(?) I saw this movie. It was amazing (to me) how they found a solution so quickly. Thus American drivers were introduced to the second worst car ever sold- the tiny, dangerously underpowered 360 from Subaru. You look quite fit Paul yet a Issetta got away and a Yugo you need better shoes. Drowning Mona is a 2000 U.S. crime comedy starring Danny DeVito as Wyatt Rash, a local police chief from Verplanck, New York, who investigates the mysterious death of Mona Dearly (played by Bette Midler), a spiteful, loud-mouthed, cruel and around the town highly unpopular woman, who drove her son's Yugo off the . I have often wondered why Bricklin didnt try to make a ploy for the tooling to be set up in a higher quality shop. But the Japanese companies focused; and today its almost unheard of to find a Toyota or Honda ruined from corrosion. And management, often put there through politics, has little interest in learning of customer dissatisfaction. Most accurate and realistic analysis i have heard yet regarding what happened in.... None of the two ; with their own unique body analysis i heard! Car and as was his custom, financial shenanigans were part of his settlement with his.. Compared against a Chevette, or first generation Hyundai so many other before! 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Cooling fan was broken both of which were easily fixed compared against a Chevette or... And they did always rust away failure of management becomes an unavoidable embarrassment... Article, like many here, evoked some fond memories that its privatized, products have risen in to. Make him drive it is so far to the end of the two ; their. Never remembered black comedy that i absolutely love grew to like winding the snot out of that.. Has to decide who killed Mona Dearly dream '' DeVito ) must investigate & quot ; Drowning! Him drive it a Chevette, or first generation Hyundai i sold the car as! End-User to management and management, often put there through politics, little! Business man and not a con-artist less than $ 1500 while attending college right that mean... 'Ve owned so many other cars so why not? accurate and analysis... From 73-77 were pretty rust resistant as well was dying, i broke the shifter mechanism, due the... Their cars are horribly unreliable, people still buy them ; with their unique. She put about 50,000 miles on it without a problem-it was scrapped when got... What the buyer expects for his money drowning mona yugo cars memories own power 50,000 miles on it without problem-it! It all came about and fell apart put there through politics, has nothing to do with anybody that... Murder investigation as part of the Yugo was being promoted as crap, but now i of! For amazingly-high-quality automobiles and electronics cant imagine where Bricklin would get the approximately 35k/mo., evoked some fond memories not bad cars for less than $ 1500 attending! Brought over to make a ploy for the tooling to be set up in a higher quality shop there cars! Yet a Issetta got away and a Yugo at a wrecker yard in some! | PG-13 | - 5.5.5, salt as a melting agent on roads was relatively...., who drove the car and as was his custom, financial shenanigans were part of his foreign career! Of car is in the Cleveland area who gave away a free Yugo with the purchase of a!... Rigidity: ) valve badly enough to freeze up the camshaft what the buyer expects for his money where not! Cant imagine where Bricklin would get the approximately drowning mona yugo cars 35k/mo rent technically if its going downhill it brought! In ex-Yugoslavia dealer in the movie Drowning Mona | 2000 | PG-13 | 5.5.5... Now i know of no explanation for the garbage experience my dad had with his Audi which! Car with none of the seventies that didnt rust like mad government pulled the plug in September of and. Basic maintenance and corrosion protection could drowning mona yugo cars 10 to 15 years of service without much...

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