Reviews for Triumph TR7: The Untold Story

The average rating for Triumph TR7: The Untold Story based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-22 00:00:00 George Harris "The Yugo was a 1980's consumer fad, the automotive equivalent of Cabbage Patch Kids . . . but with a $3,990 price tag. [It] was the product of 80's excess, the strange if not surreal mixture of a [Malcolm] Bricklin sales pitch, a Wall Street investment firm, and a San Diego savings & loan, and status-crazed Americans who wanted cars with . . . well, status -- status the Yugo didn't have." -- page 212 Routinely voted one of the worst cars of all time, Vuic's The Yugo examines the "short, unhappy life" of this inexpensive vehicle from its Yugoslavian origins in the late 70's to its flash-in-the-pan arrival on American shores in 1985-1986 and then to the end of its production run about ten years ago. The Yugo - which had its start in a troubled, communist-controlled Eastern European nation - was a very bare bones, 'point A to B' tiny hatchback coupe that was brought to the U.S. by 'businessman' Malcolm Bricklin. (Bricklin is depicted as something of a con artist, and I lost count of how many times that it's mentioned that he filed for bankruptcy in his many ventures since the 60's.) The car was intended to be better-priced competition for the Ford Escort and similar models, and it had a couple of 'good' sales years before the public discovered it was a rather shoddy piece of work. Vuic packs a lot of information into 200+ pages - occasionally my eyes glazed over with the detailed politics of Yugoslavia - but it worked best when using humor in retelling this car's brief history.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-11 00:00:00 Nicholas J Dodds I am not interested in cars. If it runs, has air conditioning, and the radio works, I'm happy. So I don't think I was the target audience for a book dedicated to one car, but it was very enjoyable anyway. Probably because it is more about the communistic system that manufactured it and the shyster businessman who imported it than it is about the technical details of the car. It is very thorough in explaining the business dealings that brought these people together. That means that we do get a brief history of the nation of Yugoslavia starting at WW2, a thorough detailing of Bricklin's various business ventures, and a look at the car industry from Ford through the 1990s. It does get a little far from the point at times. The author seems to take a more favorable view of the Yugo than you usually get. I don't still don't know enough about the actual car to make a call on that, because there really isn't a lot on the consumer experience with the vehicle. He seems to think that it gets a bad rap simply because it was cheap, had a horrible business model, and people wanted expensive brands. I'm afraid I wasn't really convinced that was the reason it was so disliked. He is also maybe a little impressed with the employment numbers and industrialization process in communist Yugoslavia. Still, he did feel the need to include sections that downplayed the brutality of the prison system and the suppression of dissidents. So while I did enjoy it and learned a lot, I'm unconvinced by the author's conclusions.