Photo: Facebook Marketplace Pierz, MN
Yugoslavia in the year 1988 was a crazy place to be. The country's mythic-like leader, Josip Broz Tito, had already been dead for nearly ten years, and the nation he left behind was fighting tooth and nail not to shatter into pieces. Something it wound up doing anyway less than five years later with sickening consequenses. In the midst of it all, this 1988 Yugo GV trundled off an assembly line in Kragujevac, Serbia. We're sure no one on-shift at the factory that day had any idea where this car would one day wind up. Or, more appropriately, what it would turn into.
The answer to these two questions is it wound up in the United States. More specifically, a small town called Pierz, Minnesota, roughly 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis. What would it turn into? Well, that'll take a bit of a story. According to the Facebook marketplace listing, it was actually two Yugo GVs five-speed manuals that were purchased by a Pierz local who'd gone to college studying auto body work and even spent some time in the '70s and '80s running his own body shop in town. So the story goes, both GVs maintained an odometer readout more or less close to zero in the man's ownership, spending most of their lives locked away in sheds until a stroke of comedic genius crossed his mind.
Against all reason and logic, and possibly only because it would've been a really funny bit if he could actually pull it off, the owner of these two Yugos promptly split both of them in two, joined them together with only his skills as a body shop tech to guide him, and added a body chassis-body extension to the middle of the strange creation to create a limousine the likes of which might make Old Man Tito chuckle from his tomb in Belgrade. Apart from the admittedly impressive bodywork, the rest of the car appears totally bonestock. As in, a Yugo's typical barely acceptable build quality even for an Eastern Bloc nation, and downright dreadful by Western standards, of course.
Per the literature on the vehicle, the old man managed to squeeze 42,801 miles out of this communist-era limo conversion before old age, and a general desire to not all day fixing communist claptraps means this one-of-a-kind automobile's sat around a fair amount recently. At the bare minimum, the thing needs a super tedious carburetor rebuild and probably a whole laundry list of other things that need doing along with it. With this in mind, an asking price for this Yugoslav stretch limo with different colors of painted flames on each side of just $4,000 seems reasonable enough. Even if it's just for Mr. Beast or WhistlinDiesel to throw it off a cliff or blow it up or something. Maybe we shouldn't be giving them any ideas.
Against all reason and logic, and possibly only because it would've been a really funny bit if he could actually pull it off, the owner of these two Yugos promptly split both of them in two, joined them together with only his skills as a body shop tech to guide him, and added a body chassis-body extension to the middle of the strange creation to create a limousine the likes of which might make Old Man Tito chuckle from his tomb in Belgrade. Apart from the admittedly impressive bodywork, the rest of the car appears totally bonestock. As in, a Yugo's typical barely acceptable build quality even for an Eastern Bloc nation, and downright dreadful by Western standards, of course.
Per the literature on the vehicle, the old man managed to squeeze 42,801 miles out of this communist-era limo conversion before old age, and a general desire to not all day fixing communist claptraps means this one-of-a-kind automobile's sat around a fair amount recently. At the bare minimum, the thing needs a super tedious carburetor rebuild and probably a whole laundry list of other things that need doing along with it. With this in mind, an asking price for this Yugoslav stretch limo with different colors of painted flames on each side of just $4,000 seems reasonable enough. Even if it's just for Mr. Beast or WhistlinDiesel to throw it off a cliff or blow it up or something. Maybe we shouldn't be giving them any ideas.
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