A Belarus artist still driving his home-made Soviet car | Hacker News Reader

A Belarus artist still driving his home-made Soviet car

theguardian.com

81 pointsastrodust59 comments

Interesting tidbit: the barrier to legally registering a custom automobile in the US appears to be pretty low: http://www.dmv.org/other-types-of-vehicles.php

The ones I browsed call out a safety inspection, which is probably the highest hurdle to jump. I strongly suspect this is just basic safety, e.g. turn signals and brakes work.

I think the barrier would suddenly rise much higher if you proposed to build a million copies of the unit, and sell them to others. Or if it suddenly became commonplace for people to make their own cars.

Even if self-built automobiles aren't safe, on an absolute scale, there are too few of them to constitute a safety threat compared to other large-scale problems like distracted, reckless, unskilled and impaired driving.

Also, the legislators probably figure that people who build their own car are likely to drive with care. The last thing that a hard working maker wants to do is to wrap years of work around a pole.

Next try getting insurance.

Some states don't require car insurance, e.g. Virginia.

So what happens if you hit someone else?

You're personally liable. Let me be clear on this: I'm not advocating being uninsured, and of course I insure my own vehicle. I'm just pointing out there are some states that don't require it.

Wow, a great way to save money though I suppose? Best drive carefully and hope the accident is the other person's fault!

Personal liability for accidents is a horrifying thought.

Seriously, can you imagine being individually liable for personal injury in an accident, with no insurance company lawyer to back you up? Insanity.

Virginia requires the following minimum coverage: Bodily injury/death of one person $25,000 Bodily injury/death of two or more persons $50,000 Property damage $20,000

https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/#insurance.asp

IFF you have insurance:

"The Virginia Uninsured Motor Vehicle (UMV) fee allows a motor vehicle owner to register an uninsured motor vehicle. At the time of registration, the motor vehicle owner must certify whether the vehicle is insured or uninsured. If the vehicle is uninsured, the motor vehicle owner is required to pay to DMV a $500 uninsured motor vehicle fee in addition to normal registration fees. Payment of the $500 fee does not provide the motorist with any insurance coverage. If involved in an accident, the uninsured motorist remains personally liable. This fee is valid for twelve months but may be prorated for a shorter amount of time."

https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/#uninsured_fee.asp

Most (maybe all) of the ones that don't require insurance require you instead to post a bond.

"In some cases, substitutions, such as a bond from an insurance company or a cash deposit of $60,000 posted with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) will be accepted."

http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/drivers/drivers/apply/doc/proof...

Virginia might actually be the only state that allows un-bonded uninsured motorists. I know it shocked me when I learned they allowed it.

In the UK, it is not unusual for enthusiasts to build and register their own cars. The Single Vehicle Approval process allows individuals or companies to register unique vehicles based on an inspection of the vehicle, rather than formal type approval. Insurance is readily available, and usually quite inexpensive because insurers understand that enthusiasts take great care of their prized vehicles. The same process applies to vehicles built from a kit, or to specially imported vehicles.

An interesting example of the flexibility of these rules is Edd China, a mechanic who has built a variety of weird and wonderful road-legal vehicles including a couch, a bed and a garden shed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKpsZOvQfu4

I merely must add, that such DIY vehicle can't be safe. You should have extensive knowledge not only to build a vehicle, but to make it road legal in most parts of this planet.

Actually, if you're thinking that assembling your car from scratch would be nice idea, and logic fails you, there are so-called "kit cars". Car constructing kits, if you wish. On street I've seen only Fraser[1], though.

[1]: http://www.fraser.co.nz/the-car/buying-a-kit-car/

Why would you have to make a vehicle road safe on most parts of this planet if you're driving it just within a single country? I would figure that car only has to pass Belarus technical and safety standards.

As for safety: it's obviously vintage tech car and as such it probably can't really compare to modern Toyota safety standards.

I meant that safety and engeneering requirements for cars are more or less strict around the world. As for being vintage - car is vintage now, it's not vintage when you've built it and are trying to register.

Yes, it just can't be safe. It doesn't matter how much the creator tries to make them safe, they just can't be man. It must be a law of nature. It doesn't even matter that the vehicle is actually vetted by organisations actually responsible with road safety.

Different kinds of safety. I doubt the Belarus equivalent of the DMV performed crash testing of this vehicle. Pretty sure their inspection boils down to "does it make funny noises?", "does it smell bad?", and "do all the lights work?". That's certainly the case here in the US.

I am sure that in this particular instance, since it's been driving for so long chances are it's not going to randomly catch fire (though it certainly could), but yeah, if you are building your own vehicle, I doubt you'd be able to do better than a team of engineers who dedicated their careers to it. Remember, they still mess up routinely, and it causes many deaths.

On the other hand, since his intention is that he is going to be driving it, he's far less likely to make the sort of "value engineering" tradeoffs that mass-production cars are subject to. He certainly won't design for components to fail shortly outside the warranty period, for example. And lacking the advanced computer simulations that are used today to often determine exactly how much material/strength is needed, he'll be inclined to overengineer and make things more robust.

It's going to lack a lot of safety features, but I think that it'd still be better than e.g. a motorcycle.

Agreed. If it is a custom build then the builder is more likely to use better components. Then again, will he account for the crumple zone that could save his life and the lives of the people he hits with his car? Here using stronger materials is actually bad. Volvo used to do this I believe: their cars would survive all manner of crashes unscathed. Their drivers and passengers, not so much.

He made it forty years ago and it passes yearly inspection. In 2000 you could still get a brand new maluch* in Poland, I'd take my chances in in the Fantasy personally and I drive a car made in '67 which is smaller than a current Mini and Fiat 500.

* http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/uploads/cars/fiat/429117.jpg

Ah a Fiat 600 isn't it? Does it still have an aircooled engine? I remember sitting the back of one as a child and almost going deaf.

The same happens if you get into my Beetle :-)

No maluch was 126p, different car. There was bis version which was watercooled, most were aircooled. Good roads to you 72.

Thanks!

I meant the 126! Duh! Thanks!

It was the incredibly noisy aircooled version I sat in.

I once went to a gig in my brother's Beetle but he'd taken all the soundproofing out as he was getting a new interior fitted; I was deaf by the time we got there, had an incredibly loud gig then got deafened on the way back. I don't think my ears have ever recovered.

My Beetle is a 1972 Deluxe, original username don't you think?

> such a DIY vehicle can't be safe.

Goes without saying; he worked at a weapons factory.

Hopefully it goes like a rocket!

It's funny that what gets called "maker culture" these days in the West is nothing like what goes on in the Eastern Bloc countries, which would fit the term far more closely.

My personal feeling is that "maker culture" evolved from being a brand for tinkering to being a fashion over the course of few years. Heck, two years ago the hackerspace I help run was the forefront of the "maker culture" in my area, now we're just forgotten - not fashionable enough, not hipstery enough.

Because apparently, what seems to be the "maker culture" today represents the level of understanding of a "monkey wants MaKey MaKey and banana" chimpanzee, whose biggest achievement was to buy a Makerbot.

The problem is not that the projects are trivial. Trivial is good, after all that's how people learn, and making should be about beating one's own limits, not competing with Hackaday (though of course at some point your limits may surpass the average project on that site).

The problem is, "maker movement" got spotted by media, mixed up with startup community, packaged and is now sold for $1200 a piece.

Yeah, those boring Westerners. ;)

http://www.digitalafro.com/michigan-man-builds-real-batman-t...

http://www.gizmag.com/home-built-dark-knight-batmobile/16736...

It's nothing like what goes on in most of the US either. There are people building tractors in their garages literally from scratch, welding together backhoes and front-end loaders to riding mowers, making adapters to get engines from one type of car onto another. This goes on all the time, in all 50 states and has been happening since the country was founded.

It just doesn't get labelled "maker culture."

Maker culture, as far as I can tell, is a term that applies to people who have never built anything in their lives suddenly figuring out that they can. Absolutely nothing wrong with that and I applaud it. I'm just not so thrilled that it's now labelled and packaged up like a nice little commodity.

> Maker culture, as far as I can tell, is a term that applies to people who have never built anything in their lives suddenly figuring out that they can.

Aka the difference between people who can wax poetic about a '6502' and people who can do so about a '6011'.

>“Therefore, my advice for the do-it-yourselfers who might want to “reinvent the wheel” as I did would be not to waste so much time on this venture. Buy a car from a dealer, now it is not a problem anymore.”

Building your own car and making something sounds cool, but this really hit home for me. What am I working on, and what problem am I really solving? A good question we should ask ourselves, in my opinion.

Very interesting video that is embedded in the article. He gets about 10 liters per 100km, or 28.24 MPG.

That's pretty bad for a car that size nowadays. I'm sure you can get to 5-6 l/100 km, that should be 40-50 mpg.

He could put skinnier tyres on and coast everywhere. That would help.

Also remove the clutch and gears and brakes. Those just add weight. Moreover stopping by backpedalling gives you a much better feel of the road.

He could put steel wheels on if they're alloys already. The steel wheels keep momentum better.

Also, he could just drive down hills, not up them.

And with a prevailing wind.

A good advice for programmers, too.

Afraid not. A programmer re-invents the wheel to fully understand the inner workings. I've never heard of anybody (non-programmer) who spent months/years to program a software from scratch just because he can't afford buying it. This guy wasn't a mechanical engineer or something, too.

He worked in a weapons factory, so I imagine he wasn't there filling spreadsheets. He was probably operating heavy machinery,so even if he wasn't an engineer by education, he had the knowledge needed to do it.

If you weren't a programmer when you started, you are when you finished. Wasn't Torvalds pretty much a hobbyist when he began?

Torvalds graduated from college with a Master's in Comp Sci.

Although I'm sure Torvalds was an exception, I've met several people that that level that still can't code to save their life. Being a Comp Sci. major and being a programmer are often orthogonal.

Yeah, but I think he was still an undergrad student when he started working on Linux, wasn't he?

There was recently the case of a kid in the australian outback who wrote his own OS from scratch as he was too remote to get anything, it happens more than you think.

Pretty much the same thing as far as I am concerned.

Maybe the poster is talking about the last phrase?

Not entirely - that's what libraries are for!

> Though some foreign collectors are ready to pay up to €10,000 for the unusual car, Karavkin says he is not ready to sell “a part of his life”.

Unfortunate. Seems like it'd be a smart play to sell it to a hipster and buy two modern cars. Hopefully he'll get some better offers after this article.

Why is that unfortunate? He's made this creation so that he could drive it, not so that someone with more money but less creativity could drive it so he can drive a run of the mill car. It's fairly obvious he's put a chunk of his soul into this machine.

Why? He may not need the money; but he may have very fond memories attached to that old car.

Not only that, but anything which goes wrong with it he can fix. The service schedule is defined by what he thinks is reasonable and whether it is running well.

I too bemoan that not everyone on the planet can be bought. What is capitalism coming to when greed is not the over arching purpose in life.

Why would it be greedy of him to sell the car?

The OP is complaining that the guy won't give up something he made just because money is waved in his face. He is complaining that greed is not motivating this person.

No, that's not what I intended at all. I'm sorry if what I wrote made it seem that way. I intended more like a gentle criticism of hipsters.

Could you consider applying the principle of charity to the seemingly nasty things people say on the web? The other person might not actually be quite as wicked as they seem.

You can't sell a car in the US unless it goes through extensive safety testing. How can I be sure this car is safe? DIY is nice, but my life is far more precious.

I must have missed the part of the article where he was trying to sell you a DIY car

He's not. My comment is that I wouldn't try to build my own car. And that almost nobody should drive a car they designed themselves on a regular basis.

If only the same approach to safety and quality was applied to software!

Like me, I am sure you have used some absolutely abysmal software. Desktop software from big organisations is the worst: Sony, BT, and Cisco come to mind.

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