When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads
remembersingapore.org
remembersingapore.org
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.
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).
Dutch customers ofcourse paid in hard currency that the DDR desperately needed so they were quite happy to export them.
Not sure what they were, though. LuAZ-1302? Liva Nivas? Simple Lada models (whether praise or mockery) are part of folklore in several countries outside the former USSR, but I feel like Soviet 4WD vehicles are talked about less internationally.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why do you think? Outside of extremely rare disabilities, I do not understand why you would believe this.
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.
No, it's not. There's fairly low level physics and chemistry reasons you can't make a car that doesn't need oil changes. Oil changes could be about as difficult as swapping out toner cartridges if they cared to make it that way though.
Please keep your Prius out of the left lane.
And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges. Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.
You're being misleading. Nobody is changing the comparable oils in their ICE car with any serious regularity either. When people talk about oil changes they're talking about motor oil.
>And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges.
99/10 can probably read the instructions and do it themselves if they care to try.
>Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.
Yes, that's how it's done in the office where you have people who's job it is to do those things. Are you incapable of emptying your trash can because the janitor does it? Even the most useless people living within the highest touch HOAs are changing their own printer ink and cleaning out the garbage collector in their dishwasher and the filter in their HVAC. There's no reason the basic stuff on a car couldn't be on that level of complexity.
You need to have that "if" reviewed by a regulatory body - with how much load you make it bear.
The issue isn't that 99 users out of 100 are actually retarded and incapable of doing a thing. The issue is that they don't want to. And wouldn't want to. And you would need multiple generational leaps in mind control technology to change that at scale.
Looks like you're telling us that US college is on par with changing car oil.
That can't last forever, of course, but it shows there are other ways.
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.
I recall looking through owner’s manual for a domestic VAZ 2101. It was standard stuff, but certainly didn’t go into detail about knolling your car.
I have also gotten them for newer early 2000s cars. Never had to use one for my 06 Vauxhall though. Apart from some standard things that really need a repair shop (replacing the exhaust for example) I've never had an issue or breakdown.
The cars I see on the side of the motorway are always new, feels like there was a period before electronics really took over that most cars were pretty bulletproof.
There were several other features like western carburetors and emissions controls, but these were likely be a “temporary” improvement for the domestic market as those parts wear out and would likely be replaced with local parts.
The thing about JDMs is they tend to be more desirable than export versions, because of whatever quirkiness that gets left behind at the time of export.
I said full-size to mean the “largest” RWD sedan offering to contrast with the 2121, 2108 and variants that were also sold in Canada. Make no mistake these cars were small compared to contemporary offerings.
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.
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 is not the car you'd want to commute on, or drive in highways but it is a super decent offroader. I'd probably choose the Suzuki Jimny over a brand new Niva Legend though.
Semi-offtopic, but what decent 'proper' off-road vehicles are available on the market these days? Seems many (most?) of the 'traditional' brands like Jeep and Land Rover as well as most pick-up trucks have long since switched to the 'luxury SUV/truck' market rather than actual off-road vehicles.
Well that ship has sailed long ago no? I am 45y old and since I was a kid I have always seen them more as urban toys than anything despute their real off road capabilities.
To me traditional off-road vehicles brands are more like Toyota, Isuzu, Santana, Nissan and Mitsubishi. These are the ones you really see off the road frequently.
Assuming that this is so, I wonder what effect Monday Night Football had on Tuesday quality.
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...
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'.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually there were, at least in some parts of USSR. Search youtube for "Harry Egipt" for some fun examples.
"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.
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.