New Chinese Car "Seagull"

I've never seen a Yugo.

Cheaply made they were notorious for breaking down. They were worse than the Fiat’s that were built back in the’70’s. I had a ‘76 or ‘77 model, I can’t quite remember, but it was a piece of trash. The only good thing about that car was that it had a hand throttle that you could use if you dared. It would act as a cruise control but when you hit the brakes, it didn’t disengage. It kind of reminded me of a throttle on a Piper Cub airplane.

I bought it for $400 in 1996.
We made all the jokes about it.

"If it had another door, it would be a We-go!"
My mom would remind me to lock it up to the front porch at night, so it won't get stolen. Fun stuff like that.

It often had an issue with the starter, so I kept a hammer by the front seat and would get out and bang on the starter with the hammer a few times to get going.

The best thing about it was that I could park it almost anywhere! I learned to parallel park driving my mom's big 'ol station wagon with wood paneling on the side and non-functioning power steering. It was like driving a tank.

In college I took joy in using the Yugo to block in larger rigs that were parking obnoxiously. It was amusing watching a ticked off guy waiting to confront what he assumed would be a tiny co-ed returning to their,"car", only to be faced with me,(let's just say I was a "formidable young person")!
It often didn't make things better when I would point out that if the dude actually had any friends they probably could have simply lifted the Yugo out of the way, or alternatively, he could learn to park! Side note, I've now been sober for a long time and haven't been in a physical fight in 18 years.

Anyway, I have fond memories of the Yugo, it was just what I needed, no more, no less, at that time in my life.

~Angela

I heard a variation on the Wego. The Wego was the "station wagon version" of the Yugo.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-expected-quadruple-tar...

Washington seems determined to save us from cheap Chinese electric cars. As the owner of a mid-priced electric car, I think it would be a good thing if we had the choice to buy inexpensive ones.

We did not need a tariff barrier to save us from the Yugo.

Angela, sorry if this crossed the line into politics.

I bought one in '91 and drove it for about 4 years. The timing chain got so loose it slipped enough that it swallowed a valve. I ended up giving the car to a high school for their auto mechanics shop to rebuild the engine and what happened afterwards I don't know.

I have a hard time admitting that marketeers got something right (and that I was correspondingly wrong). I thought that the "foreign invasion" that started with VW entering the U.S. was the correct model for the introduction of electric vehicles.

I do believe that the spectrum of electric vehicles should go all the way to small. Can our marketeers provide small at the expense of not optimizing the bejeebers out of their product lines?

Recommended reading: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

that we can solve it, but imho an EV is half vehicle, half computer.

It's probably 10 years ago now, but I remember when VW owners found themselves unable to work on their own cars, as VW has them locked out. On a regular car powered by gasoline.

People are getting more used to it, but 20 years ago it was a strange concept. You own something, paid for it outright, but are not allowed to various aspects of it, because it was possible to bar the owner from whatever it was.

How would I like to be told that a power window switch is $800 to fix (it is at the dealer), just because you own the car, you cannot rebuild the existing switch that you own, for $24.

Washington, UAW, consumers, repair shops, channel 6 news, everyone has their own agenda.

That seems to be a big issue with the farmers and newest tractors. You need software to work on them and the dealers won't give it out or sell it to the farmers. A lot of time and money is lost when the tractors, etc. die in the field and you can't get a technician out for days or weeks.

I was in Guayaquil, Ecuador in April, and more than half the new car dealers there seemed to be Chinese brands. And from the road, they seemed to have very nice showrooms as you would see for quality new car brands in the US.

I would be more concerned about the quality of their batteries. Too many fires associated with Chinese lithium ion products.

You mean like this, LOL:
https://www.wapcar.my/news/in-china-640-evs-caught-fire-in-t...

Yeah I wouldn't buy a Chinese EV, or any other EV right now. I was just surprised by how fast Chinese auto brands move in to a market where they have easier access than here.

Some of the lithium ion batteries in our house probably came from China, though. Wherever they're from, lithium ion battery fires are not common in the US but when they occur, they grow fast, are quite difficult to extinguish, and can burn down buildings, so it is a concern.

One big factor in safe electric car design is designing the battery structure so that plausible single-cell failures don't propagate under the usual conditions.

Tesla figured out back at the beginning that they would not be able to source perfectly safe cells, so undertook a structure design which has pretty successfully averted zipper failures from single-cell faults.

As my Tesla model 3 has an LFP primary battery supplied by CATL, I drive several times each week sitting over almost a half-ton of Chinese battery cells. Of course, with the LFP chemistry, my batteries don't have a flammable electrolyte, so I'm doubly safer.

I don't think the offending scooter manufacturers probably invested much development effort in making their products safe against single-cell failures.