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Americans love to take the piss of of the old soviet lada, but as an automotive mechanic I think theyre another example of how the soviets really were ahead of
by nimbius 8y ago
Americans love to take the piss of of the old soviet lada, but as an automotive mechanic I think theyre another example of how the soviets really were ahead of their time.
In 2018 most americans just commute in their cars. performance isnt a real concern, but gas mileage and longevity are. most modern compact cars are hardly capable of doing more than merging onto the interstate. And forget about trying to repair them yourself (the Honda Fit requires you to drop the engine to service the plastic fuel filter.)
but the lada could be serviced with a set of rented hand tools and in most cases had ample ground clearance to work without stands. you could rebuild the electric starter with a spool of wire and a few parts from an electronics store. it was never going to beat an american muscle car in the quarter mile, but the lada 1200 made 23 miles per gallon. the 1972 chevy nova of the same era? 14 miles per gallon.
- readhn 8y ago"The necessity is mother of invention." Russians were "hungry" and they had to work with what little they had. Their western counterparts were "well fed" and "lazy" in comparison. There was no need to be inventive and creative at every step of the process. Its a funny balance. Throwing money alone at a problem often does not work - you need to have "hungry" people as well. p.s. im not advocating return to communism lol
- taneq 8y ago> Their western counterparts were "well fed" and "lazy" in comparison. There was no need to be inventive and creative at every step of the process. That doesn't seem entirely fair. The western counterparts could never have sold this car, any more than the Soviet engineers could have sold the Chevy. They weren't being fat and lazy, they were just designing for their target market.
- gsich 8y agoI think they could have. Most people need a car to get from A to B. They take the cheapest one in most cases.
- nradov 8y agoThe cheapest cars such as the Nissan Versa or Mitsubishi Mirage don't sell particularly well in the US. Only the most desperate consumers are willing to drive around in penalty boxes.
- gsich 8y agoBoth look like normal cars.
- nradov 8y agoFrom a distance perhaps. Up close the build quality isn't great. And riding in them for more than a few minutes is rather unpleasant, at least compared to a decent car like a Honda Civic or something. The cheapest cars really skimp on noise insulation, seat supports, and suspension damping to hit those price points.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoI agree on most point but why would more damping could increase costs? Apart from the fact that one can increase ground clearance and soften the spring, thus resulting in stronger damping, the cheap gas monotube suspension price isn't really sensitive on the damping force required for normal applications
- village-idiot 8y agoThey did sell these cars in England, pretty decently at that. The gas ones that is.
- village-idiot 8y agoWhy the downvotes? They sold 300,000 Ladas to the British by 1997. It’s no Beetle, but that’s still pretty decent.
- andai 8y ago"Stay hungry." —Steve Jobs
- agumonkey 8y agoEach culture has its own design goal. Watch Jay Leno talk about French Citroen DS. I loved that an American guy could step outside the mainstream and see how something weird could actually feel good. Still sad that globalization made 'myopic more' the goal.
- andrepd 8y agoThe Citroën DS is one of my favourite cars of all time. In fact, Citroën has a soft spot in my heart as a manufacturer (due to the DS, the 2cv, success in rallying, among other things).
- agumonkey 8y agoEver saw that story about the hackability of 2cv ? https://jalopnik.com/5343163/stuck-in-desert-crazy-frenchman-builds-motorcycle-out-of-busted-citroen-2cv https://jalopnik.com/5343163/stuck-in-desert-crazy-frenchman...
- microcolonel 8y ago> (the Honda Fit requires you to drop the engine to service the plastic fuel filter.) Sure, but when do you do that? Honda says you can do it once per 100,000km (and you don't really need to do it until your fuel pressure indicator brings it up, I would think). Far as I can tell, Honda's service intervals are very long (at least for Accord/Civic, maybe the Fit/Jazz is different), failure rates are very low. edit: Also, not sure you're supposed to access the fuel filter in a Honda Fit by dropping the engine (!). The service manual[0] seems to say that you access it by removing the center console. [0]: http://www.hondafitjazz.com/manual/A00/HTML/07/SAA2E07A20326428301KBAT10.HTML http://www.hondafitjazz.com/manual/A00/HTML/07/SAA2E07A20326...
- vasilipupkin 8y agoIt’s great to romanticize them, but this really was a low quality product that constantly broke down. Make no mistake, this was not a good product, even if it was cheap to repair.
- wyldfire 8y agoI wonder if you preserved the design, had higher tolerance parts, and better QA during production, would you then have a competitive product?
- village-idiot 8y agoProbably depends on what year you’re looking at. The Lada Riva started its life as a fiat 124 in 1979 and stopped production in 2010 or so. Those are some very tired tools, and I can imagine that the tolerances got much looser with time.
- King-Aaron 8y agoAnecdote for sure, but we had a Niva on the farm I grew up on that basically lived it's whole life in a paddock, and even though the car needed to be roll-started when you wanted to use it (because the battery was the same vintage as the car) it was incredibly reliable. The only repeat issue I've really seen with the old Nivas was rust as they allegedly spent months on snow-covered docks in Russia before being exported overseas, which ended up with them "coming with rust from the dealership". I'm sure, however, that a professional day-to-day mechanic would have a different perspective on their reliability of course.
- well_that_was_ 8y agoThat was fun to read. Especially as a 'unfortunate' owner of several Ladas (Zhigulis to be precise). It wasn't so easy servicable, 23 miles per gallon can be achieved only with best petrol (good luck finding that in USSR) and overall quality was suffering from a number of things: quality of spare parts, drunkennes of conveyor worker, altering of main design to make it cheaper... And besides, _soviets_ per se wasn't ahead of time, since Lada/Zhiguli was produced on Italian factory bought completely from FIAT. So if you want to praise engineers - praise Italians first.
- aavotins 8y agoLada 2101's aren't the same as Fiat 124. Russians bought the designs and rights to manufacture and changed them significantly enough. * Fiat used either OHV or DOHC, Lada used SOHC * Fiat had rear disk brakes, Lada had drums * Lada suspension was raised and reinforced to better deal with bad roads * Lada suspension was also dumbed down. IIRC Lada did not use trailing upper arms There are more than 800 differences between these two cars. I am not saying that Italians shouldn't be praised, but in reality the Lada is a completely different car.
- Doctor_Fegg 8y ago23mpg isn’t great - a 2CV of similar vintage would do twice that.
- rejschaap 8y agoThey were easy to steal as well, most of the time. My parents owned a Lada, there was an attempt to steal it by a group of thieves that specialized in Lada's. They didn't succeed with our car, we found it half a mile down the road with radio on, lights blinking, wipers on and doors open. It had a switch to choose between LPG and gasoline, which had gotten stuck in the middle.