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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Could have been a huge success if not for the quality and compromises in the engine/transmission.

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.