The 5 WEIRDEST Communist Cars Ever Made
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- How do you double the value of a communist car? You fill the tank.
These 5 cars are so hilariously bad, you have to look at the situation with a sense of humour.
People in Soviet Russia had to save 11’000 rubles (which is £106,000 today), walk into a car dealership and pay upfront - only to hear that the delivery date was in 10 years time.
Then, when the car finally arrived - it was comically bad - poorly designed, unreliable and many of them were pretty weird. So, why were the Soviet Russians so bad at making cars?
This is a new series, the Scrapheap - where we talk about cars that are so bad, they belong in the scrapheap - straight from the factory.
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But before we get to the worst 5, how did it get to the point where a car costs over a year’s salary and the wait time could be measured in decades rather than weeks?
Well, what we now know as Russia, was a strange place in the 60s and 70s.
It was under the Communist regime and the government placed a heavy priority on its military - meaning all of the best scientists, engineers, designers, machinery and materials all went straight into the country’s war efforts, rather than working on making good cars.
On top of this, the production of cars was heavily regulated - where the government held control of what cars were imported, which were made, who could buy one and how many cars were offered out.
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Which was the worst car? I think that SMZ is kinda cool!
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I have to say that the last car passed the moose test like it was nothing, where modern cars are failling to do so.
To be fair, the "Trobi" was so well known for smoking that there was a joke back in Romania - "What's the longest car in the world?" - "Trobi, 33 meters - 3 meter car with 30 meters of smoke
@@nicolae-stefancurpas2490 Yes, the Trabi did smoke as countless other two stroke cars and motorcycles did in the 1950s. The environmental concerns back then were on a different level. So why point the finger at the Trabant? You could say the same of a DKW 3=6 which was produced in West Germany.
To be fair: the SMZ (nicknamed-invalidka(crippler)) was a free car with Ural motorcycle 2piston opposite engine given for free(!) to few disabled categories of people , how much mini cost back then…
Have you even seen a LUAZ thing?
As a czech, there were a lot of Trabants around in early 90s. Sure, it was loud and very basic, but you forgot to mention its greatest feature - the absolutely amazing smell of a 2stroke exhaust.
The 2-stroke exhaust smell was good for the safety distance
It is the longest car in the world. 2m of car, 12m of smoke, but to be honest, I would also mix in extra oil to protect the engine if I had to drive one
Polish fso syrena with 2 stroke engine were called socks because of the smell
@@charlesc.9012 The oil was not optional, but mandatory because the engine was a 2-stroke.
It didnt have oil inside as cars do today, so you had to help it with the premix.
@@vavra222 Which is why I said I would add extra oil.
WTF? Volga and Yugo actually were "good" cars. There were many much worse cars in soviet countries. It feels like these cars are just known by people from the "west".
Agreed. Yugo was a relatively good cheap car, Volga was a special Soviet car. The video is stupid.
@@BojanBojovic dont take it to heart, this is not an edjucational video, its entertainment. Guys that made the video know nothing of the countries or cars they speak of. Its youtube :)
@@Agrinddandi 🙂👍
copium
This is just straight up british propaganda
yeah, everyone compare them to western cars like BMW, Audi, Merc...Why don't you compare them to english cars like Austin Allegro, Reliant Robin, Moris Marina, etc? Keep in mind that making car in eastern europe was much more difficult. Easy to say that they have used poor materials, but it was only available material probably.
Exactly. 😃👍
Was there in USSR some cars like bmv, audi or merc? So that's why
@@funduk7734 No, there isn't, but you miss the point. Those were the only cars available at that time in eastern Europe and still you had to wait for them many years or pay twice as much from second hand. And those car did the job, they motorized whole countries, some of them are still in use like a daily cars. In western Europe there was no communism, there was easy access to technology and latest materials and still some companies did crapy cars and they dont even have excuse for that ;P
Should've compared them to american cars, after all the Volga was based on a Ford as chassis, and a Chrysler's engine. The Trabant was also better than the Chevy Chevette or AMC Gremlin - the american attempts at a cheap economy car. Also he didnt mention the ZAZ, Moskvich 2141, the first Dacia or the polish Fiat 125p. Clearly he did no actual research, just picked random cars he thought were ugly and did the "communists suck at everything" speech on each.
@@meganoobbg3387 Better how? Two stroke engine, minimal heater/defrost, questionable brakes and on and on. THe Gremlin and Chevette weren't great but a hell of a lot better than any Trabant.
We bought a used Yugo at a car auction that was almost new for dirt cheap in the late 80s in the US, and I thought it was a pretty good car compared to what you could get for the same money. For the couple years we had it never broke.
I see Yugos ever day here in the Balkans, you can still buy them for like 700$ in good condition.
My thoughts too, mine wasn't nearly as bad as everyone made them out to be. It did break down every few months but they were easy to work on and parts were cheap. It got great gas mileage. They weren't the greatest cars, but for the price they were more than adequate. The only reason i got rid of mine was the clutch went out and my uncle put a new one in and screwed something up kept vibrating the lug bolts out of the hub and the wheel fell off while driving. So it wasn't even the cars fault, but something my uncle did.
@@Niraol Yeah I went through most of the former Yugoslavia, and the closer you got to Serbia (Starting in Slovenia, going East), the more of them they were. The best condition ones IMO were in Dubrovnik.
@@iamthecheese2737 Tvis guy just seems to be anti eastern and that's it. The research seems half assed and totally leaving out any parts of the history that lead to what these things were.
@@the_kombinator agreed, im froms slovenia, my grandpa had a Zastava 128 (still a yugo) and a riva and the yugo was his "reliable work car" and his riva was to pull bitches. They were both good cars
I think these culture icons deserve a bit more respect, even if they were worse cars than the western counterparts. It was just not level playing fields. However brands like Volga, Trabant, Lada, Wartburg and many more are representative, widely loved symbols of our history over here. Just like shitty old Chevys and Citroens in the west.
The Trabi was brilliant!!
Never heard about Citroen's being shitty, quite the opposite....
@@fgsaramago You clearly never owned, and had to repair one, then ;) Citroëns are great, until something stops working - which happens impressively often.
@@AIRDRAC I have 2 Xantias and 2 XMs and a C3 Pluriel. Do all maintenance myself. Have other far more problematic cars. Most BMWs are way, way worse
nah these commie cars make chevies look like an s-class lmao
I am surprised. But not in a good way...
The Trabant was not such a bad car!
I drove one in the nineties and it was surprisingly swift.
Trabant was a great car, despite what he said, it was reliable and thanks to it being so cheap it was super easy to fix. And in it's day the first 10 years of manifacturing the car it was very futuristic, it may be fue to the fact that they copied mercedes and a lot of western brands, but it was a great car. The way it was simple made it simply the Best and teh Worst car ever made.
The Trabant was iconic! And in the moose test, it beat the first Mercedes Benz A Class. It was also popular because it was easily repairable.
But yes, there was room for improvement.
everyone is shitting on trabant, but did somebody realyze how ecologic is using old cotton as a body panel material? in todays world? not so long ago someone "invented " woodplastic, which is pretty much the same stuff as on that old trabant 60 years ago...
Trabant was a decent car and also innovative....for sixties, when it was first presented. But in the eighties it was way behind the trends.
And so much better than the beatle in allmost every aspect.
The reason for the cars not being prominent in production wasn’t the military, it had more to do with the fact that more resources went into manufacturing trucks and busses, most Soviet cities were planned around public transport and trucks took priority due to them being important for production and transportation
The Trabant when it Came out was actually cutting edge they also had good Plans for a Complete overhaul after some years. But like mentioned the party didnt care and declined
Mate, you got me all nostalgic on the Volga. I'm a Bulgarian, my country used to be a communist one until 1989 and my uncle owned a Volga 24. Not the V8 one! The thing was still running into the 2000s and, unfortunately, outlived my uncle. It was given for scraps after that, while still running. It was huge, noisy and very thirsty! I've done more miles as a passenger in this Volga than as a driver in my own car, probably. 😅 It could fit 4 people on the back seat, easily. But it needed a top-up three times for a 500 km trip with 6 inside and our luggage... 🤣 It is mostly comical now, but it was the family car I grew up with and I remember it with nostalgia.
I got a 1989 24 Volga from Varna, wildly unknown in Austria and definitely an adventure to drive
Why do you keep saying Soviet _russia_ even when talking about other countries in USSR and even Yugoslavia, a completely separate communist country? That's like me calling all people in England "Commonwealth Scots".
In 2005 (I think) my uncle drove the two of us from north-east Bosnia to the Adriatic in a Yugo. The car was fine, I was even laughing at the situation of overtaking BMWs in that thing. Someone even mounted the rails for the seat the wrong way, that's why I couldn't adjust the seat properly. As soon as we arrived at the seaside, we used a single wrench to dismount and mount the rails and the seat properly. The "repair" didn't take longer than 15-20 minutes.
That Yugo was incredibly reliable! He drove steel material and finished steel fences and rails and who knows what on it's roof for years. The only car that really rivaled that reliability is a Golf 2 (a legend too and much younger than the Yugo). I find the saying "Yu-go, but it doesn't" funny. With the things I saw it do over the years that is just US carmaker or everything-communist-is-bad propaganda ...
ah yes, to remove the seats you just had to loosen the 4 bolts and then remove the other 4 bolts that secure the seat to the rails. Such a simple car, love those things
legendary cars
Tbh I had heard somewhere before that Yugo’s were indestructible. Guess they’re up there with the Toyota Hilux eh?
@@wieldylattice3015 people here trash them on rallys all the time and repairs are super easy
The Volga and the Yugo are great cars. Also the SMZ known as invalidka is a fun little car.
You might have driven a Formula 1 car but I doubt you ever have driven a Trabant. Sure in 1990 the Trabant was outdated but in 1957 it was as good or better than any comparable cars in the West. A West-German Goggomobil or Lloyd 600 from the 1950s also had 2 stroke engines. A 1957 Beetle had only 8 more horsepower than a Trabant and was even noisier. The Beetle also had less luggage space and awful handling. The beetle was a pre-war construction after all. Compared to it the Trabant was much more modern except for the 2 stroke engine. I'm from West Germany and when I visited East Germany in 1988 I had the opportunity to drive a Trabant and was totally surprised how it handled the typical cobblestone surfaced roads in the cities of East Germany way better than the much more modern Lancia I had at the time. I also drove it through the snow which was a foot deep and with front-wheel drive and skinny tyres the traction was amazing. Before you condemn a car, you should drive it first and compare it to its contemporary competition. I think you would be surprised.
You seem upset, did he hurt your feelings?
@@peekaboo4390 I do enjoy Scott Mansell's insights into Formula One technology. He really does know his stuff regarding Formula One and seems to be passionate about it and he should stick to things he knows. But his video about the 5 worst communist cars was just cobbled together without doing any proper research. It seems like he tries to broaden his viewer base with other subjects but you can tell he didn't put his heart and soul into it. Look, I'm not a Trabant fanboy nor do I have the desire to own one but having driven one and putting it in the context of the time when it came onto the market in the 1950s it was surprisingly good even compared to many of its Western competitors. Of course in the 1990s it was hopelessly outdated but claiming it was just a crappy car shows that Scott Mansell has no consideration for classic cars and the history of technology.
Another vote for the smokey and funny sounding Trabby from ex eastern bloc Romania. I had a colleague at work who owned one in the 80's and he spoke very well of the car, compared to other cars available in the eastern bloc (he owned quite a few back then). He used to take trips to neighbouring country Bulgaria to visit the sea side with his family in it. In my experience, east German made products, in spite of the modest budget they had to fit in, where engineered responsibly and made with decent materials. Western states made nicer, more refined stuff no doubt about that, and not just cars, but well made stuff with modest means during hard times deserves admiration.
Agreed good write up. I though the Trabant was good when it came out but never really confirmed it.
There were a few awful British cars in the 1950s. Sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular 103E, a 1930s design which lingered on until the end of the 1950s. Standard 8. It didn't come with an opening boot for much of its production run so you had to fold down the back seat and grope around the void behind.
The Trabant engineers had better designs for the car that would also have been up to date from the technical perspective. But due to the struggle to get materials for production and the not forward thinking of the government ( of both East Germany and Russia ) back then, they were not allowed to make the car better or even replace it with a new model.
Sounds like the same story as Skoda. Skoda designed two cars in the early seventies. Both front wheel drive and very up to date for the era. The first eventually became the Favorit and was not released until 1989. The second was a larger family car which looked rather like the first VW Passat. This was never released and it was 1996 before Skoda, with VW funding, was able to add a family sized car to its range. The problem was Moscow, which refused to allow funding to put the cars into production.
The most famous one would be the VW Golf Mk I...
@@cyberfux The Lada Samara was based on the Mk1 Golf. I had one and then my brother got a very low mileage Samara for almost nothing. I noticed it made very similar noises and later I got to look under the bonnet. The engine was the same shape and the disposition of major external components like alternator and camshaft drive belt the same. It also had the same major design weakness of the early Golf - an appalling carburettor design. If the Russians had worked on the design to continuously improve it and up the indifferent to bad build quality they would have had a decent car on their hands. Of course they didn't and the poor state of Russian industry is a major reason why they are in such a state with the stupid war they started.
Correct. What's forgotten is that the Trabant, like everything else the DDR made, wasn't subject to market forces, at least not overtly, but driven by the SED's Central Planning, IAW the succeeding Five-Year plans. Most of the Trabant's production did NOT go to private owners, their primary source of cars, in fact, were the various auctions that the NVA and DDR civilian agencies conducted as their older Trabants aged out. Sales of old Trabants and other vehicles, in fact, was factored into their budgets. IF you had the right connections, you could get on a waiting list for a new Trabant, but that took years to fulfill...and you had to make sure the plumber wasn't coming also that day.
And which are the best 5 soviet cars?
Ps: yugoslavia had nothing to do with the ussr.
Yes, and there's no such place as Soviet East Germany.
@@lowend5566 true, but I bet he just meant East Germany when it was under heavy Soviet influence.
Likely intended to younger kids who don’t know all too much about history, or at least not European history. “East Germany” to someone who isn’t in-the-know would mean just that…the eastern side of Germany. “Soviet East Germany” would make people say “ok, part of Germany under Soviet, communist rule”.
@@rhysgoodman7628 It is kinda the soviets fault the Trabant didnt become what it could have been - the soviets restricted East Germany to only making 2 stroke cars, and despite the restriction the germans still made 2 stroke engines alot better than anyone. Still see alot more Trabants than i do VW Beetles in my country. Infact i see more Trabants than the New Beetles from 2000. lol
@@lowend5566 they were all satellites of the Soviet Union.
@@unwantedlinks2730 satellites yes, Soviets no. The Soviets were the individual states within the Soviet Union. ie a union of Soviet socialist republics.
Volga were actually very good cars. The highest level you could have as a normal person is the 4cyl version. My grandfather kept his for 45 years and I'm sure it still runs somewhere.
Not everything that comes from Eastern Europe is bad.
The Trabant is still a legend in Hungary, fan clubs exist that build on the later 4 stroke version of the car. Similar how mini clubs exist. I love how funny the car looks.
I'm surprised you did not mention the Polski Fiat tho, its another gem.
In 1990 you could walk through east-germany and just get a Trabant for free, with keys. People just left them everywhere unlocked when they got their used VW Golf 1 or 2 or some early 1980's Opel Kadett. I played in them with my friends from school. Some sold them for 50DM later. Now you have all those tuning/fan clubs who made their Trabants look super beasty.
In Berlin you can go on a Trabant Safari. Yes, driving around sightseeing in Berlin with a column of Trabants.
That content quality is higher than inflation in my country
Turkey?
@@ArpanMukhopadhyay93 Poland
Why ? I thought Poland is a developed country . You have pretty good industry and agriculture . Am I right ?
@@metaxy What is the problem ?
@@namelessone761 we're referring to lvl of inflation. It's approaching 10% Y2Y and it's a hot topic in Polish news or small talk.
This does show the soviet car industry in a bad light, although its kinda true, there were good cars made as well. For instance, GAZ "Seagull" (model 13 and 14 were defo cool), ZIL-4102, Moskvich AZLK-2141 "Aleko", ZIS-101 Sport, ZIL-112 Sport, and of course the "Laura" which didn't make it to mass production, but was very cool. Maybe do an episode on the cool soviet cars as well?
You forgot "Niva" that is first SUV in the world
Melkus rs1000 too
Pay upfront and wait for 10 years... who comes up with those stories? I was born in the USSR, my parents had a car, my both grandparents had cars, all of my cousins' parents had cars. Don't know how they paid or how much but since they all had cars when we (cousins and I) were no more than 3 y.o. and our parents were young (~20+) I don't think they waited 10 years.
My dad had Trabant, for what it was it wasnt so bad, you could pour even cooking oil into it and it ran 😂
Do a video about The Ford Pinto. Not only did its name mean “gentleman’s sausage” in Brazilian slang. It could turn into a fireball if it got rear ended
You tell him.
I've already stated he's a tithead, slagging these cars off. He should build a car himself.
Ford Pinto, que nome pika para um carro
"Pinto - Leaves you with that warm feeling" was legitimately the slogan for that thing (until it was changed for obvious reasons)
More urban legend than fact, based on an unjustified "hit piece" by a very leftist magazine called "Mother Jones". In fact, the rate of Pinto fires, especially in rear-end collisions, was no greater than other vehicles in its size/weight class.
@@selfdo the gas tank was positioned too close to the back wheels and bumper
Actually, I had driven Trabant Combi 120km/h with 3 passengers frequently on long distances. It also had semiautomatic gearbox which was some 30 years ahead of the rest.
I had a 1985 Yugo GVX. As the top model it had a 5 speed with a 1.3L (if I remember right), and a handful more of horsepowers. It was my first car and I drove it to high school (circa 1999). It was really good on gas mileage, a lot of fun as for it's size and weight did not need a whole lot of HP to get up and get going. But, yeah, it broke down all the time. That said, they were easy to work on if they came out on the market today with a price point of $8k and parts readily available I would absolutely walk up and pay cash for one. Especially with gas prices flirting with $5/gal.
I can definitely see why you'd want to buy one, but if 5$/gallon is a substantial reason to do so, you'd probably be better off buying a used Honda. It will (probably) not break and will take less fuel. Even on winter tires my dads Forester is more fuel efficient than a Yugo. (That is if the gas mileage that Google states is actually accurate)
But new cars lack the charm of these old ones.
@@helgeschneider4417 , quite honestly, being an uncaring teenager I couldn't tell you what it's mileage was. But can tell you i could take it on a 300 mile round trip on the weekend and still have enough gas in the tank to get back and forth to school for the week. Mine was the top model Yugo GVX, with a couple more horses. But the difference was it had a 5 speed instead of the 4 speed standard in lower models, it was just fun as hell to drive and did great in the snow.
There is a lot of people in eastern Germany who are adamant about the Trabant being better than the beetle lol.
Here in Balkan Yugo is a legend.
V8 Volgas weren't for officials. Regular 2.5 were for mid ranking officials and taxis. The V8 from GAZ-13 "Chaika" (seagull) executive limousine was fitted in some of the KGB Volgas so that they could keep up with foreign ambassy's cars during surveillance. And the drivers actually needed special training because in addition to lack power steering to fit the motor under the bonet engineers had to get rid of power assisted brakes.
So I have to come on here and say that for what it was, the Yugo was not that bad. My dad bought one to commute to and from work 100 miles per day. 7 days a week for 4 years and the car never once died or left him stranded. The worst this that happened was the trans mount broke so you had to shift 1,3,5 and reverse took a very quick yank lol. After my dad got a better vehicle, he parked the Yugo under a tree. It sat for 6 years in the Oklahoma weather. My dad said I could have it when I was 17 and could do whatever I wanted with it. We aired up the tires cut the rotten exhaust off and ran it open exhaust manifold. Put fresh fuel and a battery in it and drove it as a pasture car for 2 more years before my buddy and I rolled it in the field messing around. The Yugo is still out in the pasture to this day lol. One the best and shittiest cars I ever drove. The damn thing wouldn't die though. Lol maybe ours was made on a sober day haha. I don't know about others but I like to drive the hell out of slow cars 😎
This is a much more complicated topic than it seems.
Firstly, the so called "Eastern Bloc" was not a monolith and judging everything from perspective of Soviet Union is a great oversimplification.
Secondly, there's a huuuuge gap between obsolete-at-the-moment-of design cars from the seventies or eighties and relatively modern cars from the fifties.
Thirdly, keep in mind that by definition/philosophy the cars for the working class cannot be directly compared to the likes of modern D or E segment.
And so on and so on...
Yeah. References to "Soviet Russia" and "Soviet East Germany" suggest that this guy doesn't know too much about what he is talking about. And why did he put a Yugoslav car in the so-called "Soviet" package?
I live in The Netherlands, and my grandfather had a Lada Riva. Even by the standards of the day, late 1970s, it was _rubbish_ . The suspension was bouncy, the steering incredibly heavy, the trim woeful, and consider that the exported versions of Soviet cars were much better than the ones sold internally, because they actually needed to compete on this side of the Iron Curtain. The only reason my grandfather got it was because it was cheap, and well, so was he. He often joked that the best part of the car was the toolkit, which makes sense. Russia is huge and the car is very unreliable, and if you break down 30 miles from the nearest village, you have to be able to fix it yourself.
Yugo owner! Yes, I said it... (bought used). I have fond memories of it. I didn't have to worry about how my GF liked it. As I didn't have any. But seriously, I think mine just ran better as it had the 'optional" steering wheel and brakes. Cheers!
I'm also a Yugo owner - actually I have TWO of them! 🤣
They're actually MORE RELIABLE (yes, you read it!) than my 1996 Rover 416Si (I still have it) and my 2004 Ford Focus Mk2 (will be sold) 😁😯
me, three. bought new. I had the engine replaced while still under warranty and then it fell apart for good when I still had one more payment slip in my payment book. But I still loved it, especially the wing window.
My granddad had one of these trabants and I loved, I had to try it myself when I grown up and was unforgettable experience, managing the gears only traby owners knows what I am talking about. 👌✅👍
I'd love to get my hands on a Trabant estate, they look kinda neat, and it would be an interesting project car
I was just thinking the same, they are even surprisingly spacious
There are still more Trabant 601 registred in germany than Teslas are. For a Tesla you have to wait a long time too sometimes, and some individual Teslas are built so bad they belong straight in the scrapheap too.
My aunt had a Trabant (and it was in a bad shape); in the 90s, we went to a trip into the mountains (not high mountains, we have in Hungary), with 3 cars: Lada, Trabant and VW Golf. Guess, which one couldn't climb the mountain.
Good strong cars. We had a FSO Pick up, it was a great workhorse.
This programme sounds like hate and ridicule.
It was Polish made if I remember correctly.
every tym i see youtubers talking about this cars, the comment section absolutley gets fired up.
I am still riding my 1984 DDR made MZ250 that I purchased brand new, Most reliable vehicle I have ever owned.
I was 6 or 7 years old when my father got a blue Velorex because he was handicapped. It had a motorcycle engine and would wake up all the neighbors every morning when he had to drive to work. I was so proud having to ride in it as a small kid. You have to understand that most people didn’t own a car so it was almost a privilege for us to have one. It was slow and loud, and only had 2 seats but we managed to have my parents, my brother, and me fit inside as we drove to the beach every weekend. I would give anything to go back to those times when my parents were young and my dad was alive… To those who never grew up in Soviet Russia, it’s almost impossibly to understand the culture and the people
I own and drive a lada 2101 from 1973, the thing has done nothing to let me down once, and with small things you need to do for something that's fifty years old (seals and some bushings, the few plastics that receive hard wear) its fine. Its robust and strong. The biggest typical issues the west had was rust, since they didn't salt the roads in the east, no rust protection was put on the cars. But my lada is robust, and i intend on getting another to use, as parts are cheap, and i find it more reliable then anything else i have ever seen, and cheaper to run. Its light on gas, parts are plentiful, and the quality is astounding.
The trabant was actually a very good and reliable car! Not only was it very nearly as fast as the early minis and way more practical. It was made from (at the time) a new modern light weight material that didn't rust. Add to that the revolutionary front wheel drive years before any mini was made AND a longer average life expectancy than the "un killable" E class mercs of the 80s and you won't make fun of it anymore! Also the 1990-1991 models were made of steel and had a 1.1 liter VW engine so they could keep up with traffic at the time! Oh and I forgot to mention that it was quite a Successful racing car. The simple fact is that in countries outside of Eastern Europe Trabants are overlooked as outdated comedy crap because at the time the cars available in the west were "so modern" How many small 80s European cars have you seen that haven't rusted into a pile by now? Not many I presume!
The west makes luxury crap.
keep taking your copium bruh, the trabant was awful
@@RealTonyMontana for its time it was good and is still pretty reliable to this day
@@RealTonyMontana It's fine to be completely and utterly wrong but dear god man, calm down.
i actually own a velorex. it's the most common 350 ccm mod. with a whopping 16 hp. more than enough in that car. (i like to think of it as my rear engined sports cabriolet) it's a hilarious nightmare to drive. due to the thin wheels, any small groove in the road will have it weering all over. and with 3 oddly placeed wheels, you will find every groove and pothole there is.
My one is alsow a 16/350
The Soviet people just didn't really need cars all that much. My father was allocated to work on a factory in 1970s and got an apartment from the state in a 5-storey building in a neighborhood specifically built for the personnel just 1 km away from workplace. He worked and lived there until his death in 2011. This was the Soviet way - earn your place and stay there. I wonder what he would think of me now switching carreer for the third time in less than 10 years.
Btw, he used to own a green Niva as those shown on 2:24. It's by far one of the best Soviet cars, and is still being manufactured.
Ok, now on to the Top 5 best communist cars.
I vote the mighty Lada Niva into first place!
To be fair Skoda was pretty competitive up to some point
I saw an SMZ some time ago, posted a picture on social media and wondered what on earth it was. A friend who had had to suffer the Soviet Union educated me, and added: "Our disabled neighbor had one. There were probably more things wrong with the car than the guy" XD
Looks very cool though. Cries for a Hayabusa engine.
One important thing about SMZ and similar cars for disabled - in Soviet Union those were not sold, but given to disabled people, mostly war veterans, for free (actually leased without a fee). Yes, they were terrible even in Soviet terms, but they were truly available and granted lots of mobility to their users.
The Trabant isnt a weird car, its a nice car, it does have a nice smell too
And putting fuel in the under hood tank over a glowing hot exhaust meant a steady hand could keep you from setting the car and yourself alight😮
Friends had a Lada Niva. Not on your list but a solid bare bones 4x4. Apparently quite a good car. I also had a friend who owned a Cosak motor cycle. The bike was a horizontally opposed twin but no where near as good as the BMW. The owner did touring rallies. The sad part is that one of the larger bike shops in parramatta in Sydney had (stories I've heard, 5 or 10) Cosak bikes left over that no one would buy so they dumped still in their crates in the parramatta River. I've heard of too many places to remember which sounded more likely. Like the Ducati 900 or the Dharma, once you got them running they were quite good. But there you go. A story of stories I had told to me by hmm people who I believe knew what they were talking about.
The Cossacks were sold by a car dealer, Capitol Motors, and were imported in a very convoluted trade deal involving IZHMASH rifles and Australian wheat.
And still, there is something about Eastern European vehicles that makes me like them. Simple no-nonsense technology, functional design, easy to repair.... My experience with my 1970 Volga M24 is that it's equally reliable or unreliable as western vehicles of that time.
Can't wait for the Lada, Skoda, and first Honda Civic. More like Seive-Ick. Recycled ship steel. ( rotten and rusty )This will be an epic series!👍😃
In Hungary, the Trabant was nicknamed "Paper Jaguar" because of the duroplast the body was made of, and often mocked because of bad quality. But not all the Eastern Bloc cars were bad, as Lada cars were pretty good as far as I remember.
7:57 I daily a Trabant, once you got all the quirks figured out it is a small little race-cart
Yugoslavia was not communist but socialist. Yugo was not that unreliable until the war started in the nineties.
And lastly the Yugo was a relatively good for a cheap seventies car, comparing it to all the others in your list is nonsensical.
Dont bother comrade, in my town theres still more Yugo GT55s than there are VW Beetles or even New Beetles from 2000s lol. So clearly you neighbours did something right when you made the Yugo.
@@meganoobbg3387 Humans like their myths as they are lazy to change their perspective on things and investigate more. :) You and I know very well from our recent history how difficult is for a regular people to get over their myths. :)
Grew up in Canada. Fuel injection was hardly commonplace in 1977.
Might want to do some research - the Yugo had a better reliability rating than the Corvette.
The roads were safer in the days before the wall came down, plus they were tree lined and great for all road users including cyclists. They had plenty of busses so cars were not the only option. When the roads filled with massive Audis, BMWs and Mercedes doing silly speeds the roads got dangerous so the trees had to go.
A better title: some communist cars I've heard about.
in Bulgaria the car situation hasn't been that bad according to my grandparents in Bulgaria you could go and buy a car as soon as you could afford it and no waiting list plus the corecom (foreign market items) had great imports , most if not all the cars sold back then are still running and functional to this day and they can found in very good conditions for little money. so from what I have heard and from what I know in Bulgaria the situation wasn't as bad
I recently inherited the Trabant of my granddad.
Last half year of production, made in the first half of 1990 (after that till 1991 the 4-stroke 1.1 was produced).
In service for the past 32 years, has at least 149000 km behind it's back, but possibly even more.
Holds up in the city and outside the city as well (does 80-90 traveling speed with a consumption of 4-5 liters / 100 km and might I add, the engine was never taken apart).
The most reliable member of our family, never failed us and starts like a trooper every day.
Does it have problems? Sure. The crankshaft simmerings are shot, I need to replace those and the bearings. Rust? Some... Nothing serious.
Anyone can degrade anything. If I could, I would overhaul it to factory condition, because it's a great car to drive (and I drove many cars: Passat 5, Peugeot 308, Focus Mk4, Citroen Xsara Picasso and even a Peugeot 206, none compares).
I'd lie, if I said, I didn't want something slightly bigger, but the Trabi stays with me.
A small correction: The Trabant was actually created in 1932(!) as DKW F1. There, you already have the whole construction including the ersatz car body, which was not made from sheet metal, but from plywood, covered in faux leather. The car was developed further during the 1930ies until the DKW F7. During World War II, the F8 was developed, but not produced. After World War II, the DKW F8 was produced as IFA F8. Then it got a new car body in pontoon style and the Duroplast planking and was called AWZ P70. This proved to be very expensive to make, so a redesign created the Trabant P50 in 1958. The later incarnations Trabant 600 and Trabant 601 did not differ much, in fact, the Trabant 601 was the Trabant 600, just with a different car body. (I know, because we had a Trabant 600, which then got a new car body in 1981, turning it into a 601).
Certainly the DDR avoided "re-inventing the wheel". It should be kept in mind that the war had destroyed so much of Germany's industrial plant, and in the DDR, the Soviet Army had hauled off fairly much anything of value as war reparations. That only 12 years after the disaster that was the end of WWII in Germany ANY car could be mass-produced is a tribute to the hard work that the Germans did to rebuild on BOTH sides of the Inner German Border. While certainly many features of the "Trabbi" were laughable, for 1957, it was innovative, considering the huge production constraints the DDR had to deal with.
@@selfdo It might have been equal to its contemporaries in the late 1950ies and early 1960ies (see Lloyd 600), but it did go nowhere from there.
@@SiqueScarface Quite true. It didn't HAVE to. The very fact that the design remained static for over 30 years is more an indictment of the "Socialist" planned economy rather than the DDR engineering. They knew quite well that, by 1965, the Trabant needed some redesign and upgrading.
The trouble was, back at the Kremlin, their OCCUPIERS, the USSR, while glad that the DDR was a worthwhile partner in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON (the NVA was the only Soviet satellite that got the "latest and greatest", such was the reputation of the DDR military, even though many of its senior officers had served not only in the Wehrmacht but even the Waffen SS!), didn't WANT things like the Trabant to be "competitive", as they wanted to sell SOVIET items to them, like what became the Lada. They were already unhappy that many Soviet Army members serving in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany had acquired items from the DDR, and were typically quite happy with them! From their perspective, who the hell had WON the "Great Patriotic War", anyway?
Therefore, just as originally the Trabant's design was constrained by what was little was left in the wake of WWII and what their Soviet masters were willing to allow them, so the DDR still had to make do. This wasn't simply in building cars. Anxious to build their state airline, Deutsche Lufthansa (later Interflug) with more than leftover Ju-52s from the war and whatever Soviet-made castoffs the USSR begrudged them, what remained of Junkers dusted off one of the late WWII-era proposals, the EF132, and also studied the Soviet OKB-1 prototype, to produce three Ba 152 airliners. While this design had promise, it was effective "killed in the cradle" by the Soviets, who wanted the DDR to use its upcoming Tu-104 and Tu-124 short-range jetliners, and have those German aircraft engineers work in the USSR. As a compromise, when Interflug got its jetliners, the Soviets allowed them to be operated by German personnel, which they did not at first allow the other satellites; that is, any Soviet-made jetliners in, say, Polish or Czechslovakian livery were indeed crewed by Soviet pilots (usually active-duty or reservists members of their "Long Range Aviation" in civilian airline pilot uniforms, as was also the practice with Aeroflot).
The issue was never any limits of DDR scientific and engineering talent, though, like in any of the Communist countries, their managerial "know how" was lacking. It was what they'd be ALLOWED to do by their Soviet masters. The Trabant was being allowed to be finally upgraded in the late 1980s simply b/c of "Perestroika", i.e., Gorbachev deemed that things like that shouldn't be interfered with if the USSR and its satellites were to prosper. We know ultimately how that worked out.
@@selfdo I would not blame it to the USSR. The GDR did not have the tooling and the investment money ready to build a newly designed car. For the higher level Wartburg, they bought the tooling from Renault to make the transition from the 313 to the 353 series. But even the Wartburg 353 was based on the old IFA F9 design, the 3-cyl. variant of the DKW F8, whose brother ran as DKW 1100 in West Germany (and paved the way via the DKW F101 to the Audi 80 and Audi 100).
In the end, all new designs for both the Trabant and the Wartburg and especially the transition to 4-stroke engines were blocked by missing investment money.
@@SiqueScarface Most of the industrial plant that was left in 1945 was hauled off to the USSR as war reparations. Even years later, when the DDR was seen more as a partner in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, rather than a occupied country (which it STILL was), the Soviet planners weren't inclined to do anything to help their former enemy, and even actively interfered in whatever deals the DDR could make, which wasn't all that much. Of course, the DDR's top brass in the SED were simply Soviet stooges, and the infamous Stasi was itself closely supervised by the KGB. Whatever "freedom" the DDR had to conduct business was simply to do what the Soviet planners weren't interested in. You have to hand it to them for their ingenuity which the Trabant is a fine example of in "making do" with very limited resources.
Awesome, I love this format already! Crapy cars are so funny and adorable, I´m coming directly from aging wheels video about his Trabbi.
the Trabant is a great car in my opinion. A friend of mine got his aunts trabbi when he turned 18 and is using it as his every day car. It does not need a lot of gasoline, if something breaks down, he can easily fix it himself, cheap insurance and it looks nice. I absolutly love these things, you can still see a lot of them here in eastern Germany and they are still running well.
The reason the Trabant was called the 601 was that 600 people were waiting for one but only one got one.
Oh man, those Velorex look kinda awesome, honestly. Would love to have one... Looks simple enough to make yourself with a good tubing bender....
I have one
5:54 Did the majority of the workforce really drink _Brandy_ on lunch breaks??
B/c my information on Soviet stereotypes was that only diplomats & top officials could get decadent Western concoctions like Brandy & everyone else drank Vodka for lunch.. 🤔
So much Soviet military equipment uses ALCOHOL as a coolant and/or lubricant. So did Marshal Georgi Zhukov.
Latest trabi got 1.3 polo engines in 1991.absolutely rocked
Volga GAZ-24 was never available to general public. The facelift 24-10 that included power steering, different door handles, black plastic grill and updated dash was released on 1985.
Volga has never had power steering. Until model 3110 with ZMZ-406 engine in the 1997
I wonder how an American Chevy Vega and Chevette would hold up next to these russian cars. I can't think of any other les reliable cars ever produced in the USA. Although Chrysler made several that came close. Perhaps the Cadillac V-8-6-4 or GM Diesel Sedans which took a regular gas engine and forced it to become a high compression Diesel with awful results.
Ironically I love most of these cars so much cause of how weird and unreliable they are
They're not unreliable though, at least most of them.
I was fully expecting Marty from MCM to turn up at some point and say "In the bin!" 🤣
8:55 - Wrong analogy. When you ordered e.g. a Trabant and you waited 15 years, you didn't get the car from 15 years ago, you got one that was just built a few weeks before, so if you ordered it in 1965 and got one in 1980, you got an 1980 model. Of course they didn't change much during the years, but the analogy only works if we say that BMW made just E90s with minor tweaks all that time.
And if you ordered a car which went out of production before you got it, then you were "upgraded" to the newer model - but you had to pay the difference if the new one was more expensive (happened mostly with Skoda, when the S100 came out after the 1000MB and when the 120 came after the S100).
Poorly researched attempt at soviet bashing. If you're going to say a car is unreliable back it up with facts because this just sounded like an opinion piece
I would like to have a GAZ 24 because they were Made with the new tooling to what would have been the Studebaker Lark for 1966. They snatched up all of the production molds and tooling after Studebaker went out of business. Volga got Studebaker and Packard tooling from Canada. The GAZ -13 looks a lot like a mid fifties Packard. The Gaz- 21 was a Plymouth essentially. They bought the tooling as surplus which could be sold to any one on the open salvage market.
Here in romania , my patrnts said preety much anyone working in the state farms witch were all the farms back then you culd steal a lot of stuf like horses (horses were more like borowed than stolen), fuel , potatos an a ton of other stuff.
Who cared about comfort? The economy was so bad that you HAD a car and you were the coolest person in the world.
Everybody wanted a car. But still. For Post-soviet countries using cars, made in 60-70's is still normal. Some people even say "I know this car as my 5 fingers, I can fix it on the road. I don't need another car"
We had better priorities that cars. We had apartments being given out for free, and we also had widespread public transportation, which meant that factories were producing more trains, rails, planes, ships, and other useful stuff instead of highly wasteful and community-destroying cars.
In fact, relative to one's wage, it was cheaper to buy a plane ticket in Russia in the 1978 than it was in 2018! Despite all the innovations in plane fuel efficiency, Capitalist airlines are still more expensive for the average people than the Socialist airlines were a few decades ago. That's not progress, that's regress.
Also, I don't understand the shitting that some condescending RUclipsrs do on Soviet cars. Soviet cars were good. They might not have been the most luxurious, and they weren't produced as massively, but they were GOOD. It's a fact. Also, IMHO, many of the Soveit cars looked good, despite not folowing the latest design trends. When I was a kid, my favorite model was Vaz 2101 (Kopeika) (the design is Italian, but the engine is Russian), and now my favorite model is Vaz 2121 (Niva), which was designed in 1971, and haven't had a design change TO THIS DAY, and it still looks great, in my opinion. And it's not only my opinion, by the way, I've heard the same thing about Niva from my foreign friends as well.
Thanks for video. To be fair, some Soviet cars like the Lada weren't too bad. They sold a lot of cars in the UK. Though, not 100% Soviet in terms of models based on the Fiat 124, they must have been doing something right. They provided many people practical cheap transport? In fact Fiat 124s and derivatives like the Ladas must be one of the most mass produced cars to date. Quoting the Wiki page for Fiat 124, "The Lada constitutes the vast majority of 124 production, and makes it the fifth best selling automotive platform in history".
The funny thing is, i'm from West Germany an I have a Trabant now days, but I love it, it's just funny to drive with it
This series is bad and you should stop doing it. Not that the cars were not bad, but that there are so many inaccuracies in this video that it's not even worth trying to count them.
I love that Western approach:
"- Name five countries that broke off the Soviet Union
- Poland, East Germany, Czechia, Hungary, Romania"
I read an account of an East German who finally got his Trabant. After only a couple of years, he was driving round a sharp corner at quite moderate speed when the left rear wheel fell off. Passers-by expressed no surprise, but nipped in to lean on the right-hand side of the car so that his passengers could get out. Nor did the onlookers express any surprise when the right front wheel decided to join the strike action, and fell off, too . . .
"Vorsprung durch Technik, kamerad!"
Yes, I too believe the dumbest of the dumb anti-communist propaganda... Sheesh.
10 Years. "Will that be in the morning or the afternoon? (my refrigerator is coming in the afternoon)
Ronald Reagan 👍
Tbh in the 1950s the Trabant was actually pretty good. Front engine Front wheel drive, 4 gears and reverse, and ubtil today repairable on your own.
Forget it, this is clearly just another edition of the "communists suck at everything", no actual research put into it considering the ZAZ, the first Dacia's and the polish Fiat 125p are missing.
@@meganoobbg3387 And also the Lada Riva and the old Skoda. Two of the most iconic.
This is why there should be a separation of the State from the Economy. The Free Market has corrective mechanisms that work, given then atmosphere has zero govt favoritism and zero govt run enterprises. Deregulation is the path to prosperity.
Separation of state, economy, and religion makes a great country.
Too bad its a myth. Huge companies like General Motors need the goverment to help bail them out of bankrupcy every ten years or so. You know which countries have the most "free markets"? - the colonized ones - the US wants countries to "free" (open up) their markets for their own damm benefit only. Ronald Reagan said: "South Korea's prosperity is due to free markets" when at the same time S Korea was doing its 5-th 5 year plan for economic and social development - JUST LIKE North Korea, USSR and all other communist countries at the same time? Also America during the same time was doing propaganda against Japan and japanese goods - like cars, telling people "buy american", imposed taxes and later regulations on how imported cars need to be built to be "safe" or "eco". So NO - your "free market" has never existed in a single country yet - every sovereign country does plenty of regulation - thats how you protect your industry and production from foreign ones outcompeting it. But ofcourse a market and economy is called "free" as long as regulations are done to benefit the large corporations - thats your economy - corporatist, not "free market." The market is "free" as long as rich perverts are free to do whatever they want, and not taxed.
@@meganoobbg3387 So what's you understanding of 'separation of economy and govt'? I'm asking because from what you said, you've demonstrated a clear lack of clarity.
@@ujjvalchauhan6628 Theres no such thing as separation of goverment and economy, or separation of power. You either have the goverment run the economy, or you have the economy run the goverment, there are no other examples in history.
@@meganoobbg3387 True. But it is how a monetary system works. It is still to early for Star Trek's universe.
I've driven cars without power steering back in the 1990ies, and they were far from being a "workout". As soon as the car rolls, steering becomes easy. You only really need power steering to steer while the car is standing. So, when moving a car into or out of a parking spot, you automatically steered it so that it wouldn't require much force. After a bit of practice, this becomes really easy. If I had the choice, I'd always pick a car without power steering. Power windows is also something you don't really need. Power brakes, that is useful of course.
Just to make sure this is corrected: the Trabant was not one of the most popular car in east Germany, it was the ONLY one a normal person could even dream of getting hold of, there were some really really rare soviet cars or other imports some officials had, but everything else was either a motorcycle (very popular in east Germany) or a Trabant if you were one of the 'lucky' ones that could get one (yes there was basically illegal private sales of those cars, which the government just looked over because there was no other realistic way of of managing the demand)
The Trabant was for sure hopelessly outdated, but in an environment where parts for repairs are hard to come by, let alone afford and fuel is kind of expensive, this was not a bad choice of a car, there is a joke that said you can repair a Trabant with a piece of steel wire and a hammer, which isn't entirely false, the small 2 stroke engine was easy to maintain, except of ignition and lights basically nothing electric on the car... Everything is so rudimentary it can usually also be fixed with rudementary tools..
As I said, it was not a bad car fot the environment it lived in 😜
And today some people still like it as oldtimers, I mean you can basically tune the engine like you did on a moped in your teens, it's funny...
Anyway it's probably a lot more reasonable with just 800kg weight than these ugly SUV with 3 Tons everyone is suddenly driving around.. If you compete the car sizes back then and now you're speechless
this list is a pile of opinions that belongs in the scrapheap... straight from the factory
Lol cry more commie
Big misshap, yuoglsavia was never communist
The Volga was the best car someone could get in the USSR without being a high ranking communist party or military official. The car was pretty much reserved for managers, doctors, military officers, government officials and taxi drivers.
Trabant was not burning oil in the first couple of minutes after starting, it burned oil all the way - for it had a two-stroke engine that had to have a premix of petrol+oil of a certain degree as fuel.
Its amazing how much more trabants lasted to this day than actually "good cars"
All these cars still had one thing in common with their western counterparts: They were able to drive people from point A to point B, which is ultimately the sole purpose of a car, anything else is extra
(Two guys on the run in East Berlin trying to steal a car. Finally selecting a Trabant because it didn't have an obvious car alarm.)
(First guy trying to pick the door lock w/ a Swiss Army Knife.) "You know the only thing you hear about the Swiss Army is their knives?"
(Second guy responds.) "The only thing you hear about the Trabant . . . " (kicks the door open) ". . . is they're plastic."
When you hear people saying, the government should intervene more in the car industry.
Well, we had been down that road and the result was, well, educational!!!
Trabants are very well known cult cars in the Czech Republic even today, and can still be occasionally seen on the road in perfect condition.
Due to international restrictions on car imports, Russia now is producing a refreshed version of the SMZ Soviet microcar. It's the new SMZ-2, which is a battery-less plugin EV. It's an all electric car that has unlimited range. Or rather, its range is limited only by the length of the extension cord you can afford.
you're so hopelessly wrong about the trabie. It is a brave little cheap car. My relatives had one and they drove it from Poland to Hungary every year. No problems.They never broke down. There was so little to break down on them.
Yugoslavia had nothing to do with the communist Soviet Union. The Yugo was even a hit in the USA because of it's cheap price.
yeah that was due to the second Arab gas crisis from 1979-1982 when my dad bought his 79 Toyota Corolla station wagon he paid 4800 for it and got laughed at by his grandmother who when she bought her house in 1939 or 1940 paid at most 4,000 and now even with the poor shape the house is in it's estimated to be worth roughly 800,000