by optymizer
3 subcomments
- 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.
by TowerTall
5 subcomments
- 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.
by BohdanPetryshyn
5 subcomments
- 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
- 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.
by okaleniuk
1 subcomments
- 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.
by petargyurov
0 subcomment
- 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.
by justincormack
0 subcomment
- I 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.
- 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.
by postexitus
0 subcomment
- For 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.
by alexey-salmin
0 subcomment
- It 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.
- It is strange. On the first photo of the article I actually don't see a single Soviet-made car.
- They 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.
- 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.
- The only car I ever driven was Lada...
- They still roam Cuban streets today.
by philipallstar
0 subcomment
- The Venn diagram of people who think capitalism is bad and people who never saw a Lada is a single circle.