When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

https://remembersingapore.org/2025/10/30/soviet-made-cars-singapore-70s-to-90s/

by sohkamyung • 9 months ago

125 77 9 months ago

Loved the Lada jokes. "How do you double a Lada's value? Fill up its tank" could apply to quite a few modern cars with terrible depreciation curves

gsf_emergency_4• 8 months ago

The related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied

https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...

eru2• 8 months ago

The classic claim was that the Trabi was made out of cardboard.

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'.)

kakacik• 8 months ago

BMV (which sounds same as BMW is most languages) - Bakelite Motor Vehicle.

classichasclass• 8 months ago

Heck, we made that joke about the Yugo.

MisterTea• 8 months ago

There is a Yugo parked near a brewery in Queens NYC that always blows my mind. It's still in decent shape for its age and must be driven regularly as it's always in a different parking spot.

ctphipps• 8 months ago

Or the one that made it into an Australian TV advert. Guy walks into a service station. “Got a windscreen wiper for my Lada?” “Yeah, mate. Sounds like a good deal to me.”

noir_lord• 8 months ago

What do you call a Lada with a sun roof?

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.

fransje26• 8 months ago

"Do you know why Ladas have a heated back-window? To warm your hands while you are pushing."

TowerTall• 8 months ago

We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.

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.

jojobas6• 8 months ago

Export cars were made with some special care, for years buying a car destined for export was preferable to a brand new one built for domestic market, even if "scratch and dent".

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.

lnsru• 8 months ago

Probably it’s worth mentioning that the repair shops as we know them today didn’t exist in the world of Soviet cars. So everybody was responsible for his car and the owners were forced to spent weekends under the car in garage blocks sharing tools, knowledge and beer.

janisorlovs2• 8 months ago

Anything with “export” variant was considered better (in consumer goods 100%). Even butter

xattt3• 8 months ago

The Canadian export versions of the Lada full-size sedans had doors reinforced with beams for increased safety. So structurally, they were indeed built a little better.

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.

jabl2• 8 months ago

We had a Lada 1200 when I was a kid. Mid/late 1970s. The car was a 1:1 copy of the Fiat 127 if I remember correctly.

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.

usrnm3• 8 months ago

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

brnt• 8 months ago

There were Lada dealers up until the nineties here in NL, but few people drove them. I've never heard anyone describe them as reliable though. To the contrary.

eptcyka• 8 months ago

It would’ve been great if it was a 1:1 copy, but the soviets made the design cheaper to produce and less reliable.

cafard• 8 months ago

According to a bit in one of Arthur Haley's potboilers, American manufacturers would ensure that VIPs got "mid-week cars", with the notion that the last weekend's drinking would have lost its effect by Tuesday, and that the next weekend' drinking wouldn't start until Thursday night.

Assuming that this is so, I wonder what effect Monday Night Football had on Tuesday quality.

optymizer2• 8 months ago

We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.

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.

eru2• 8 months ago

Which country was that in? I assume not in Singapore, because you'd probably have just taken public transport to school?

janisorlovs2• 8 months ago

Taking an account “growing watermelons”: either Southern Ukraine or somewhere is Caucasus

croisillon2• 8 months ago

beautiful Moldova ;)

anthk• 8 months ago

Spaniard here. My dad owned a Lada Samara too; but infinitely tweaked in order to fit the standards on security from Spain in the 90's. It couldn't compete with most of the cars made form the West in the 90's (especially on acceleration and top speeds) but it worked without many issues over 20 years.

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).

expedition32• 8 months ago

In the Netherlands the East German Trabant was a fairly populair hipster car in the 1960s and 70s. East Germans were considered the good Germans.

Dutch customers ofcourse paid in hard currency that the DDR desperately needed so they were quite happy to export them.

HeinzStuckeIt• 8 months ago

I wanted to cross a mountain in Uzbekistan by bike. As I found myself pushing my bike up a dry riverbed full of large stones, I thought, “Who the hell mapped this as a vehicle track on OpenStreetMap? No one could drive this”. And then I was twice passed by locals in some ancient Soviet-era vehicles that coped with the terrain just fine. I had to respect that tech, which could probably be repaired with simple tools.

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.

d_silin• 8 months ago

The only car I ever driven was Lada...

petargyurov• 8 months ago

I too have fond memories of my dad driving me around in our navy blue Lada. Not sure what the model was, but it was the one with rectangular headlights, not round. The chassis on that thing was solid metal.

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.

timonoko• 8 months ago

My father got genuine Soviet Moskvich aimed for soviet domestic market in 1976. Piece of shit and pure comedy.

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.

okaleniuk2• 8 months ago

The Fiat 124 was actually a pretty good car for its era. Russians improved its suspension, refitted the engine, and messed up the hydraulics. Still, pretty good car for the 60s. And then, they continued to produce the same car with miniscule modifications until 2010s.

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.

jojobas6• 8 months ago

They could have done much better if it was a priority. The priority however was tanks, nuclear submarines and missiles. Up to 25% of GDP was outright wasted on the military.

chupasaurus• 8 months ago

Considering reliability and quality of those tanks and missile platforms - it wouldn't be better.

alexey-salmin2• 8 months ago

Not within the socialist system, there was absolute zero incentive to do a quality job. Sometimes there were incentives to do more on the quantity (see "udarnik") with moderate success but these were detrimental to the quality.

JSR_FDED• 8 months ago

Singapore is an unusual market when it comes to cars...

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.

Cthulhu_2• 8 months ago

It does sound like driving is only for the rich, but then, Singapore is too densely populated for cars to be a realistic large scale transport thing.

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.

grishka• 8 months ago

Meanwhile, in the USSR itself, if you wanted a car, thanks to the planned economy, you couldn't just go and buy one. There was a queue you had to register in and wait for months, maybe years.

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.

okaleniuk2• 8 months ago

Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"

encabulator2• 8 months ago

Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR.

Actually there were, at least in some parts of USSR. Search youtube for "Harry Egipt" for some fun examples.

jojobas6• 8 months ago

There actually were commercials and they were ridiculous.

"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.

encabulator2• 8 months ago

Yes, one of the paradoxes of Soviet Union was that used cars were more expensive than new cars, at least in the 80s. That was exactly because of the sales restrictions. You needed a special permit for a new car. These were usually distributed by trade union, in quantities like 1 permit per year per your_workplace. Used cars, however, were sold on "free market".

jojobas6• 8 months ago

Scarcity wasn't the only reason, there was also poverty. A qualified engineer with 10 years of experience would need to save all his salary for a few years. Very few people could afford cars from their official salary.

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.

sega_sai• 8 months ago

It is strange. On the first photo of the article I actually don't see a single Soviet-made car.

justincormack• 8 months ago

I remember getting a Volga taxi to the airport in Bulgaria in the 1990s. The taxi drivers wife sat with me in the back, passing around cigarettes. It turned out that every time it went round a corner it stalled so she was there to help restart it. Fortunately I was not in a hurry and there were not too many corners. I gave them a large tip in the hope they could buy a better taxi.

yomby• 8 months ago

They still roam Cuban streets today.

alexey-salmin2• 8 months ago

It still makes me sad that Lada Niva is such a missed opportunity, basically world's first SUV with 4wd, unibody and coil spring independent suspension. The 2-door version looks good even.

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

philipallstar• 8 months ago

The Venn diagram of people who think capitalism is bad and people who never saw a Lada is a single circle.

postexitus• 8 months ago

For my parents' first car - they were between a Lada Samara and a (then recently re-designed by Bertone) Skoda Favorit. I was more of a Lada person, but one of their friends convinced them that Skoda is much better and they went along with it. I was upset for quite a while - but now looking back at it - although Lada had its appeal, I see that they made the right choice with their limited amount of money.

pseingatl• 8 months ago

They were all over the place in Panama in the 1980's. The Niva model (Lada's SUV) even had a crank starter...just in case.

When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

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