We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.
My uncle had a Lada 2101 ("Kopeyka", i.e. "1 cent") and that was a rust bucket, but he also drove it on unpaved country hills for decades. He was growing watermelons and he used his Lada to transport the watermelons to the farmer's market. You would be amazed to see how many watermelons fit in that small car.
Both of these were better than my grandfather's Moskvich. I actually liked the rugged feel of the Moskvich, but it had a known design fault with the handbrake causing it to malfunction, so for uphill parking purposes, we always had to carry a brick or two in the trunk.
Spaniard here. My dad owned a Lada Samara too; but infinitely tweaked in order to fit the standards on security from Spain in the 90's. It couldn't compete with most of the cars made form the West in the 90's (especially on acceleration and top speeds) but it worked without many issues over 20 years.
Yes, upon entering the cars of my friends' relatives it often was like entering an F16 because of how smoothly their hit 100 kph on highways,
but I'm sure most of these modern cars with ABS and whatnot had had repairing/fixing issues in the upcoming years (and not cheap to fix).
We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.
It served my family well for many years, and for us, it was "sort of" rock solid. That a Lada was "rock solid" was in no way the norm. People were saying that we had a Wednesday model, meaning it was assembled on a Wednesday.
The saying goes that the quality of cars built on Monday/Tuesday was impacted by the hangovers the workers had from all the vodka drinking during the weekend. For Thursday/Friday cars, the workers were already mentally gone on the weekend but on wednesdays the workers were fresh and motivated, and did their job proper.
We were lucky and that car took us kids on many road trips all across Europe. I remember that the car seat was covered in plastic, and on our first trip from cold Denmark to sunny Italy, we all got burn marks from the seats and had to stop buying some covers.
> We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.
Ladas were common over here until the late 80'ies. They all but disappeared during the 1990'ies. They weren't exactly known for quality compared to Western cars, but they were cheap, and easy to fix by yourself if you were so inclined.
And yes, the story behind the Lada was that the Soviets made a deal with Fiat to acquire an obsolete factory. So the entire factory was dismantled and shipped to the USSR. And then they just kept producing the same model, with extremely minor changes, for decades.
> And then they just kept producing the same model, with extremely minor changes, for decades.
That's not true, though. The first models were, practically, Fiats, but then they diverged and the second generation (produced in the 80s) had significant changes. Niva had nothing to do with Fiat from day 1, it was developed internally
It was released in 1977 and afaik is still sold under the "niva legend" name in several countries while the "niva" name is also used for the rebranding of some GM based models.
Export cars were made with some special care, for years buying a car destined for export was preferable to a brand new one built for domestic market, even if "scratch and dent".
My father always carried a bunch of membranes for the fuel pump, a spare accessories belt, distributor, fuses and possibly something else. Every item in the list was a result of limping somewhere with a vague hope of finding the part in stock - crap quality compounded with deficit made pretty much every trip a bit of a gamble. Driving schools also taught maintenance and troubleshooting, having a private car was perceived somewhat like a mechanic hobby.
I doubt it was the norm with Western/Japanese cars by the 70s.
Probably it’s worth mentioning that the repair shops as we know them today didn’t exist in the world of Soviet cars. So everybody was responsible for his car and the owners were forced to spent weekends under the car in garage blocks sharing tools, knowledge and beer.
The manuals for the Lada were epic. In a quick search for an original one I came upon this [1] which is an English version one, which is even better than what I was looking for! It describes the entire car's operation and mechanism in extensive detail along with descriptions of how to replace parts, what might go wrong, and more.
I'm not sure that 'just send it to the repair shop' was an overall improvement in society in so many ways. In modern times those shops are infamous for exploiting people's ignorance and ripping them off to an absurd degree, and it primarily affects the lower socioeconomic groups within society, since the upper groups tend to cycle through relatively newer cars more regularly, in part to avoid having to deal with long term maintenance issues.
Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance.
There are ways around that. You can keep the cars simple to repair and also expensive and unavailable, so that only the people with tech know-how and/or willingness to learn it get them. Make cars as tools for professionals and tech enthusiasts, like PCs were in the 80s or construction equipment is now. Or you can make the cars cheap and disposable enough that if one fails, you can just send it to a scrapyard and get a new one.
I don't like either of those workarounds, so repair shops are the least bad option.
A lot of users have an extreme level of resistance to learning tech. Which applies even to the most simple of instruction-following operations.
They aren't clinically retarded. They could learn those things if someone forced them to. But you, as a product developer, can't force them. It's utterly impractical to overcome that resistance for a mass market product.
It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.
Which has now looped around because you can get cheap 'export' beer in grocery stores here (western Europe) which is pretty much guaranteed to be produced in the same breweries as the premium brands like Heineken. These breweries never stop producing because empty tanks are wasteful.
There were Lada dealers up until the nineties here in NL, but few people drove them. I've never heard anyone describe them as reliable though. To the contrary.
My father got genuine Soviet Moskvich aimed for soviet domestic market in 1976. Piece of shit and pure comedy.
I tried to start when I inherited it, but eventually needed nearest Soviet Citizen to start it. All you needed to do is to remove a spark plug and pour some vodka in.
Ladas and skoda’s where reasonably common in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, I always had a bit of a soft spot for them, seeing Skodas resurgence after VW took over was cool as well, Skoda went from a laughing stock to winning car of the year pretty quickly and now people generally like the brand.
Or the one that made it into an Australian TV advert. Guy walks into a service station.
“Got a windscreen wiper for my Lada?”
“Yeah, mate. Sounds like a good deal to me.”
The classic claim was that the Trabi was made out of cardboard.
Of course, that's a myth: the Trabi was actually made out of cheap plastic.
The Trabant was actually a decent modern car when it debuted in 1957. The problem is that they produced it until 1991, when it was far from modern.
I was born in Zwickau, where the Trabant was produced. It's no accident that they picked Zwickau for the production, because that's where Audi's predecessor company (Horch) had made their cars before.
(Going on tangent: Audi is Latin for 'listen', and Horch is German for 'listen'.)
> the Trabi was actually made out of cheap plastic
Today it would be called an 'advanced composite material', e.g. it's closer to fiberglass than plastic and used recycled materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast
The Trabi was made of duroplast. Sussita, the only Israeli car (similar vintage) used fiberglass (only slightly better). I guess both had the advantage of being lightweight (and cheap).
The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.
That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.
Singapore is an unusual market when it comes to cars...
To put it in perspective, a Toyota Camry today costs $207,000 (US dollars).
That includes the Certificate of Entitlement - that allows you to actually drive the car for 10 years. After 10 years you can renew the CoE, but that's about $100K so most people don't want to pay that to take a 10 year old car to age 20. As a result there are almost no older cars on Singapore's roads.
The upside is very little traffic congestion.
To be fair, the public transport is outstanding and the services like Grab (think Uber) are ubiquitous and reasonably priced.
It does sound like driving is only for the rich, but then, Singapore is too densely populated for cars to be a realistic large scale transport thing.
I think older cars are becoming rare in other places as well, here in the Netherlands only hobbyists keep older (>20 years) cars around because maintenance gets more and more expensive, mechanics / work hours are easily something like €75 an hour. But also, a huge amount of used cars are exported towards eastern Europe.
I too have fond memories of my dad driving me around in our navy blue Lada. Not sure what the model was, but it was the one with rectangular headlights, not round.
The chassis on that thing was solid metal.
I remember one time when I was in the back and my dad took a rather sharp turn at a major junction and the rear door swung open. I calmly alerted him to the situation and with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand reaching behind, somehow got the door closed whilst I sat semi-afraid for my life.
I remember the horn also broke so he rewired it to a custom red button that he mounted on the driver's door handle.
Meanwhile, in the USSR itself, if you wanted a car, thanks to the planned economy, you couldn't just go and buy one. There was a queue you had to register in and wait for months, maybe years.
The quality was crap. The cars came out of the factory essentially unfinished — you had to take your new car to a workshop to have an anti-corrosion coating applied for example.
Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"
We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.
My uncle had a Lada 2101 ("Kopeyka", i.e. "1 cent") and that was a rust bucket, but he also drove it on unpaved country hills for decades. He was growing watermelons and he used his Lada to transport the watermelons to the farmer's market. You would be amazed to see how many watermelons fit in that small car.
Both of these were better than my grandfather's Moskvich. I actually liked the rugged feel of the Moskvich, but it had a known design fault with the handbrake causing it to malfunction, so for uphill parking purposes, we always had to carry a brick or two in the trunk.
Which country was that in? I assume not in Singapore, because you'd probably have just taken public transport to school?
Taking an account “growing watermelons”: either Southern Ukraine or somewhere is Caucasus
Watermelons can actually be grown even in Siberia. They will be small and won't taste great, but many people do it just for fun.
Yeah, huge in Central Asia too
beautiful Moldova ;)
Spaniard here. My dad owned a Lada Samara too; but infinitely tweaked in order to fit the standards on security from Spain in the 90's. It couldn't compete with most of the cars made form the West in the 90's (especially on acceleration and top speeds) but it worked without many issues over 20 years.
Yes, upon entering the cars of my friends' relatives it often was like entering an F16 because of how smoothly their hit 100 kph on highways, but I'm sure most of these modern cars with ABS and whatnot had had repairing/fixing issues in the upcoming years (and not cheap to fix).
We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.
It served my family well for many years, and for us, it was "sort of" rock solid. That a Lada was "rock solid" was in no way the norm. People were saying that we had a Wednesday model, meaning it was assembled on a Wednesday.
The saying goes that the quality of cars built on Monday/Tuesday was impacted by the hangovers the workers had from all the vodka drinking during the weekend. For Thursday/Friday cars, the workers were already mentally gone on the weekend but on wednesdays the workers were fresh and motivated, and did their job proper.
We were lucky and that car took us kids on many road trips all across Europe. I remember that the car seat was covered in plastic, and on our first trip from cold Denmark to sunny Italy, we all got burn marks from the seats and had to stop buying some covers.
> We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.
Ladas were common over here until the late 80'ies. They all but disappeared during the 1990'ies. They weren't exactly known for quality compared to Western cars, but they were cheap, and easy to fix by yourself if you were so inclined.
And yes, the story behind the Lada was that the Soviets made a deal with Fiat to acquire an obsolete factory. So the entire factory was dismantled and shipped to the USSR. And then they just kept producing the same model, with extremely minor changes, for decades.
> And then they just kept producing the same model, with extremely minor changes, for decades.
That's not true, though. The first models were, practically, Fiats, but then they diverged and the second generation (produced in the 80s) had significant changes. Niva had nothing to do with Fiat from day 1, it was developed internally
The Niva was actually a very modern car when it was released. I think it was one of the first unibodied AWD.
I'm not sure when the Niva was initially made but I have memories of rusted Nivas from the late 80s to early '90s already.
It was released in 1977 and afaik is still sold under the "niva legend" name in several countries while the "niva" name is also used for the rebranding of some GM based models.
Export cars were made with some special care, for years buying a car destined for export was preferable to a brand new one built for domestic market, even if "scratch and dent".
My father always carried a bunch of membranes for the fuel pump, a spare accessories belt, distributor, fuses and possibly something else. Every item in the list was a result of limping somewhere with a vague hope of finding the part in stock - crap quality compounded with deficit made pretty much every trip a bit of a gamble. Driving schools also taught maintenance and troubleshooting, having a private car was perceived somewhat like a mechanic hobby.
I doubt it was the norm with Western/Japanese cars by the 70s.
Probably it’s worth mentioning that the repair shops as we know them today didn’t exist in the world of Soviet cars. So everybody was responsible for his car and the owners were forced to spent weekends under the car in garage blocks sharing tools, knowledge and beer.
The manuals for the Lada were epic. In a quick search for an original one I came upon this [1] which is an English version one, which is even better than what I was looking for! It describes the entire car's operation and mechanism in extensive detail along with descriptions of how to replace parts, what might go wrong, and more.
I'm not sure that 'just send it to the repair shop' was an overall improvement in society in so many ways. In modern times those shops are infamous for exploiting people's ignorance and ripping them off to an absurd degree, and it primarily affects the lower socioeconomic groups within society, since the upper groups tend to cycle through relatively newer cars more regularly, in part to avoid having to deal with long term maintenance issues.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-6025672/mode/2up
Why can't we have both?
Ability to self-service your car but repair shop if you don't have the skills, tools or don't want to do it yourself.
Repair shops are a necessity.
Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance.
There are ways around that. You can keep the cars simple to repair and also expensive and unavailable, so that only the people with tech know-how and/or willingness to learn it get them. Make cars as tools for professionals and tech enthusiasts, like PCs were in the 80s or construction equipment is now. Or you can make the cars cheap and disposable enough that if one fails, you can just send it to a scrapyard and get a new one.
I don't like either of those workarounds, so repair shops are the least bad option.
> Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance.
Why do you think? Outside of extremely rare disabilities, I do not understand why you would believe this.
A lot of users have an extreme level of resistance to learning tech. Which applies even to the most simple of instruction-following operations.
They aren't clinically retarded. They could learn those things if someone forced them to. But you, as a product developer, can't force them. It's utterly impractical to overcome that resistance for a mass market product.
It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.
Anything with “export” variant was considered better (in consumer goods 100%). Even butter
Which has now looped around because you can get cheap 'export' beer in grocery stores here (western Europe) which is pretty much guaranteed to be produced in the same breweries as the premium brands like Heineken. These breweries never stop producing because empty tanks are wasteful.
There were Lada dealers up until the nineties here in NL, but few people drove them. I've never heard anyone describe them as reliable though. To the contrary.
My father got genuine Soviet Moskvich aimed for soviet domestic market in 1976. Piece of shit and pure comedy.
I tried to start when I inherited it, but eventually needed nearest Soviet Citizen to start it. All you needed to do is to remove a spark plug and pour some vodka in.
Quite obvious on hindsight.
Loved the Lada jokes. "How do you double a Lada's value? Fill up its tank" could apply to quite a few modern cars with terrible depreciation curves
What do you call a Lada with a sun roof?
A skip.
Why do lada’s have heated rear windows?
To keep your hands warm while pushing them.
Ladas and skoda’s where reasonably common in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, I always had a bit of a soft spot for them, seeing Skodas resurgence after VW took over was cool as well, Skoda went from a laughing stock to winning car of the year pretty quickly and now people generally like the brand.
Or the one that made it into an Australian TV advert. Guy walks into a service station. “Got a windscreen wiper for my Lada?” “Yeah, mate. Sounds like a good deal to me.”
Heck, we made that joke about the Yugo.
The related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...
The classic claim was that the Trabi was made out of cardboard.
Of course, that's a myth: the Trabi was actually made out of cheap plastic.
The Trabant was actually a decent modern car when it debuted in 1957. The problem is that they produced it until 1991, when it was far from modern.
I was born in Zwickau, where the Trabant was produced. It's no accident that they picked Zwickau for the production, because that's where Audi's predecessor company (Horch) had made their cars before.
(Going on tangent: Audi is Latin for 'listen', and Horch is German for 'listen'.)
> the Trabi was actually made out of cheap plastic
Today it would be called an 'advanced composite material', e.g. it's closer to fiberglass than plastic and used recycled materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast
The Trabi was made of duroplast. Sussita, the only Israeli car (similar vintage) used fiberglass (only slightly better). I guess both had the advantage of being lightweight (and cheap).
BMV (which sounds same as BMW is most languages) - Bakelite Motor Vehicle.
"Do you know why Ladas have a heated back-window? To warm your hands while you are pushing."
The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.
That's the problem with authoritarian regimes. You can buy a plant by a fiat (pun intended), but you can't make a decent car by a decree.
It is strange. On the first photo of the article I actually don't see a single Soviet-made car.
Singapore is an unusual market when it comes to cars...
To put it in perspective, a Toyota Camry today costs $207,000 (US dollars).
That includes the Certificate of Entitlement - that allows you to actually drive the car for 10 years. After 10 years you can renew the CoE, but that's about $100K so most people don't want to pay that to take a 10 year old car to age 20. As a result there are almost no older cars on Singapore's roads.
The upside is very little traffic congestion.
To be fair, the public transport is outstanding and the services like Grab (think Uber) are ubiquitous and reasonably priced.
It does sound like driving is only for the rich, but then, Singapore is too densely populated for cars to be a realistic large scale transport thing.
I think older cars are becoming rare in other places as well, here in the Netherlands only hobbyists keep older (>20 years) cars around because maintenance gets more and more expensive, mechanics / work hours are easily something like €75 an hour. But also, a huge amount of used cars are exported towards eastern Europe.
I too have fond memories of my dad driving me around in our navy blue Lada. Not sure what the model was, but it was the one with rectangular headlights, not round. The chassis on that thing was solid metal.
I remember one time when I was in the back and my dad took a rather sharp turn at a major junction and the rear door swung open. I calmly alerted him to the situation and with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand reaching behind, somehow got the door closed whilst I sat semi-afraid for my life.
I remember the horn also broke so he rewired it to a custom red button that he mounted on the driver's door handle.
Meanwhile, in the USSR itself, if you wanted a car, thanks to the planned economy, you couldn't just go and buy one. There was a queue you had to register in and wait for months, maybe years.
The quality was crap. The cars came out of the factory essentially unfinished — you had to take your new car to a workshop to have an anti-corrosion coating applied for example.
Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"
The only car I ever driven was Lada...