Decades after it came to the United States, the Yugo is still a punch line. Late-night talk show hosts savaged it on air to the point that “Yugo” became a synonym for cheapness and a bad deal. According to Car Talk, it was the worst car of the millennium. Simpsons viewers in the early ’90s might remember Homer buying a thinly veiled parody of a Yugo from Crazy Vaclav, who proudly proclaims that “it will go three hundred hectares on a single tank of kerosene!” When Homer asks where the car is from, Vaclav replies that “the country no longer exists.”

If you think I’m about to claim that the Yugo was really a diamond-in-the-rough car, I’m not. The Yugo’s problems were very real, though whether they were truly disastrous is debatable. For such a small car, it was strikingly fuel-inefficient (to be fair, it also tended to perform worse on high-speed American highways) and it had a variety of emissions problems.

But the US auto industry is littered with examples of bad cars — and more people actually drove in them than the Yugo. A grand total of 141,000 Yugos were ever sold in the United States. The Chevrolet Celebrity sold nearly three times as many cars in 1986 alone. The Cadillac Cimarron was an overpriced lemon that sold about 140,000 cars over the course of its lifetime and cost several times more than a Yugo when it first came out. So why is the Yugo so uniquely hated?