The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

Author:Jason Vuic
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Automobile Industry, Industries, Transportation, Non-Fiction, Automotive, Cars, Business & Economics, History
ISBN: 9780809098910
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

The Car-Buying Bible

Q: What do you call a Yugo that breaks down after 100 miles?

A: An overachiever.

In 1986, Consumer Reports had more than 3.3 million subscribers. It was, according to one poll, the most trusted consumer information source in America, ahead of even the Better Business Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency.1 The magazine had been published since 1936 by a nonprofit organization known as the Consumers Union (CU). For some fifty years Consumers Union had tested almost every product imaginable: toys, tires, food, luggage, stockings, washing machines, lawn mowers, cameras, and, of course, cars. The organization’s goal, said its director, was “to make consumers skeptical of advertising and demanding of quality, and to let manufacturers know that they will be judged.”2

Consumers Union zealously protected its objectivity, avoiding any hint of bias: it refused, for example, to accept any form of advertising in its publications, and to this day Consumer Reports features no outside ads. Zero. By the same token, advertisers were not allowed to use Consumer Reports’ ratings or reviews in their own advertisements, and the magazine refused to accept gifts, wholesale goods, or samples of any kind. The testers at Consumer Reports purchased their products in secret. They had a team of professional shoppers who paid in cash or with personal credit cards and who bought goods in retail stores just like normal consumers would. The only difference was that once they bought the goods, they shipped them back to a facility in Mount Vernon, New York, where testers there put them through the ringer.

They tested the durability of luggage by tumbling bags two thousand times in a machine that looked like “a Ferris wheel.”3 They tested the strength of plastic trash bags by filling them with garbage and dropping them on the ground over and over again. They dirtied up dishes, stored them overnight, then stuck them in a dozen different washing machines to see how clean they would get. They tested stereo speakers in an echo-free chamber. They tested facial tissue in a homemade “sneeze machine.” They tested condoms by blowing them up to the size of watermelons. They even tested the safety of baby carriages by whipping them around to see if their tiny test dummies would fall out. Perhaps the magazine’s most famous test involved mattresses. These were pummeled at least one hundred thousand times in the center (to simulate sleeping) and twenty-five thousand times at the edges (to simulate sitting) by a buttocks-shaped battering ram made from two halves of a bowling ball.4

The Consumers Union tested every thing, it seemed, and each month recorded its results in Consumer Reports. The public valued its judgments. Manufacturers feared them, for “passing Consumers Union tests,” wrote The Wall Street Journal, was often “crucial to a company’s success.”5 In 1983, for example, a Connecticut heater company named Kero-Sun declared bankruptcy after Consumer Reports wrote that kerosene heaters were generally fire hazards that could emit noxious fumes.6 That same year, shares in Coleco Industries dropped nearly 20 percent

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