Mikhail Kalashnikov died in 2013.
Thanks for bringing that up . . .
But I was talking about the company, not an individual
The Lada in the photo above is an ok looking car imo. The only actual impression of Soviet era cars I have is from a James Bond novel. In the story Bond had to steal one while doing some espionage work for MI6 in Russia, and that particular car (his get-away-car) had to be manually lubricated while you drove. There was a push pedal oil pump lever on the floor, and apparently the driver was supposed to push it once in a while supplement the lubricant for the crank shaft bearings.
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Back in the 80’s we had a Russian immigrant employee and I remember teaching him how to drive a car, he had never driven a car in his life and he was over 50 years old.
He told us that even if an ordinary person could buy a car, the police would be at the door demanding to know how he got the money to buy it.
Did such a car actually exist, or was that artistic license? That seems insane.
Tesla? This rolling piece of crap would have a hard time taking on Yugo. No thanks.
At the depot, one of my colleagues had grown up in east germany, and he told a somewhat similar story.
He said people were on long waiting lists to get a car . . . Wartburg or Trabant, I believe. People would wait years.
By the time his number came up, he got a car that was older than he was, according to him, anyways.
If we are to believe the stories about a society in which neighbors are told to snitch on each other, I can see the police showing up at his doorstep, if he was seen driving a car which he wasn’t . . . yet . . . allowed to have
It would be great if someone built a car as “bullet proof” as the SKS.
Yeah Wartburg was the car I was trying to remember. A few years ago one of the books I read had the guy escaping the eastern bloc in a Wartburg. I just can’t recall if it was a novel or a true recount. At any rate he did have some issues with that car.
From Wiki. Maybe this is why they talked about manually oiling the engine.
“Because the engine was a two stroke unit, it relied on the passage of the petrol mixture (two-stroke oil and petrol, at a ratio of 1:50) to lubricate the engine. With the freewheel device disengaged, the engine could be starved of lubricant and seize on long down-hill runs unless the throttle was opened briefly from time to time. Nevertheless, disengaging the freewheel device was recommended to give engine braking in snowy or icy conditions.”
Quite common on cars at one point… but not since about 1916 or so in most cars! The Mercer Runabout had small manual air pumps to push gas the the engine and oil to the engine for splash lubrication. Made work for the driver and passenger, too, if he had one.
The East German “people’s car” was the Trabant. Wartburgs were for “Party” officials. They were bigger and fancier. Built in pre-war BMW’s Eisenach plant.
Trabants were the proletariat cars. 2 cycle engines, FWD, body made from cotton fibers and resin - called Duraplast. Nearly obsolete when offered for sale in 1962 and built nearly unchanged until 1991. They ceased production shortly after German reunification.
To buy one, you got a book for payment stamps from Trabant and purchased stamps to be added to the book when you could afford them. When the book was full, that indicated the car was paid for and you would take the book to Trabant for your car to be ordered. In 4 to 10 years it would arrive.
Yes! Fiat 124 Sedan.
I believe it was actually called “Leukoplast” . . . at least that’s the name I remember
As for nearly unchanged . . . that is relative
There are early and late versions, and early unmodified cars are somewhat sought after now
I also believe some of the very last Trabants had a VW Polo engine . . . seems like a waste of a good engine, if you ask me
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The 124 was RWD. Wasn’t the Yugo a smaller car, and FWD? Like the Fiat 128 and other small Fiats?
The Yugo 45 was based on Fiat 127 and the 511 on Fiat 128.