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When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads
- BohdanPetryshyn 1y agoLoved 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
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoThe related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabbi-prices-at-a-high-60-years-after-cult-east-german-car-was-born https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...
- eru 1y agoThe 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'.)
- ido 1y agoThe 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).
- flohofwoe 1y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AniseAbyss 1y agoThe Trabant was a normal car if you look at what the rest of Europe was driving at the time. In fact the DDR did not economically collapse until the late 1970s. Ofcourse the real problem was they could not actually make enough of them. You could go to a Citroen dealer and pick up a 2CV the same day.
- kakacik 1y agoBMV (which sounds same as BMW is most languages) - Bakelite Motor Vehicle.
- classichasclass 1y agoHeck, we made that joke about the Yugo.
- MisterTea 1y agoThere is a Yugo parked near a brewery in Queens NYC that always blows my mind. It's still in decent shape for its age and must be driven regularly as it's always in a different parking spot.
- ctphipps 1y agoOr 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.”
- noir_lord 1y agoWhat 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.
- fransje26 1y ago"Do you know why Ladas have a heated back-window? To warm your hands while you are pushing."
- TowerTall 1y agoWe 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.
- jojobas 1y agoExport 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.
- lnsru 1y agoProbably 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.
- somenameforme 1y agoThe 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 https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-6025672/mode/2up
- optymizer 1y agoWe 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.
- eru 1y agoWhich country was that in? I assume not in Singapore, because you'd probably have just taken public transport to school?
- janisorlovs 1y agoTaking an account “growing watermelons”: either Southern Ukraine or somewhere is Caucasus
- croisillon 1y ago
- d_silin 1y agoThe only car I ever driven was Lada...
- petargyurov 1y agoI 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.
- timonoko 1y agoMy 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.
- okaleniuk 1y agoThe 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.
- jojobas 1y agoThey could have done much better if it was a priority. The priority however was tanks, nuclear submarines and missiles. Up to 25% of GDP was outright wasted on the military.
- chupasaurus 1y agoConsidering reliability and quality of those tanks and missile platforms - it wouldn't be better.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoNot within the socialist system, there was absolute zero incentive to do a quality job. Sometimes there were incentives to do more on the quantity (see "udarnik") with moderate success but these were detrimental to the quality.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoSingapore 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.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIt 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.
- grishka 1y agoMeanwhile, 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.
- okaleniuk 1y agoFun 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!"
- encabulator 1y ago> Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. Actually there were, at least in some parts of USSR. Search youtube for "Harry Egipt" for some fun examples.
- jojobas 1y agoThere actually were commercials and they were ridiculous. "Demand <product> in your local store". If you tried to demand something from the demigods of soviet trades you'd be laughed out of the neighborhood.
- encabulator 1y agoYes, one of the paradoxes of Soviet Union was that used cars were more expensive than new cars, at least in the 80s. That was exactly because of the sales restrictions. You needed a special permit for a new car. These were usually distributed by trade union, in quantities like 1 permit per year per your_workplace. Used cars, however, were sold on "free market".
- jojobas 1y agoScarcity wasn't the only reason, there was also poverty. A qualified engineer with 10 years of experience would need to save all his salary for a few years. Very few people could afford cars from their official salary. The USSR was robbing people of the fruits of their labour to make stupid amounts of tanks, incite guerillas all over the world and build useless railroads to nowhere.
- sega_sai 1y agoIt is strange. On the first photo of the article I actually don't see a single Soviet-made car.
- justincormack 1y agoI remember getting a Volga taxi to the airport in Bulgaria in the 1990s. The taxi drivers wife sat with me in the back, passing around cigarettes. It turned out that every time it went round a corner it stalled so she was there to help restart it. Fortunately I was not in a hurry and there were not too many corners. I gave them a large tip in the hope they could buy a better taxi.
- yomby 1y agoThey still roam Cuban streets today.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoIt still makes me sad that Lada Niva is such a missed opportunity, basically world's first SUV with 4wd, unibody and coil spring independent suspension. The 2-door version looks good even. Could have been a huge success if not for the quality and compromises in the engine/transmission.
- philipallstar 1y agoThe Venn diagram of people who think capitalism is bad and people who never saw a Lada is a single circle.
- postexitus 1y agoFor my parents' first car - they were between a Lada Samara and a (then recently re-designed by Bertone) Skoda Favorit. I was more of a Lada person, but one of their friends convinced them that Skoda is much better and they went along with it. I was upset for quite a while - but now looking back at it - although Lada had its appeal, I see that they made the right choice with their limited amount of money.
- pseingatl 1y agoThey were all over the place in Panama in the 1980's. The Niva model (Lada's SUV) even had a crank starter...just in case.