The Ford Motor Company would have you believe that you need a $60,000 twin-turbo V6 off-roading pickup truck with an aggro name and more cheats than a 12-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto V. Bah, we say! You need this only if you are a tool of the landed gentry. We’re here to prove them wrong with a true car of the proletariat: our 1991 Yugo GV.
Sure, the 2017 Ford Raptor is “new” and “fast” and “safe,” and it, you know, “starts with some regularity.” It also has “technology” and “features” and was made by a country best described as “still in existence.”
And those are all things you cannot say about Jalopnik Deputy Editor Mike Ballaban’s gifted Yugo.
But! How often will you really find yourself blasting across a desert landscape at highway speeds? Not especially often, I’d wager, unless you were to regularly engage in an extravagant, indigenous-exploiting bourgeoisie activity like desert racing.
To find out if our hypothesis is correct, we took a borrowed Raptor and the Yugo to a parking lot to prove, once and for all, that all the car anyone really needs is the communist take on an early 1970s Fiat.
Watch the video. Decide for yourself.