Only elite party members will have them.
The masses can walk to the collective farms and people’s factories.
On a quiet night in the summer we could sit outside and listen to it rust.
For reliability, in my opinion, the worst car in my lifetime was the Chevy Citation. Back in the 80’s I saw more of those cars dead on the side of the road than any other, by far. It became a running joke among me and my friends. “There’s another one”.
I was fortunate to be in Hamburg the week of the unification. We had the day off so drove into the former East Germany.
It smelled like the city of Cleveland from my youth when steel mills were still operating. They still burned coal everywhere. There were still soldiers with automatic weapons walking around. Trabbis were prevalent and those that had ventured into the former West Germany were generally loathed by that population, especially if they wandered onto the Autobahn.
The Germans have almost as many Trabbi jokes as there are blonde jokes.
Best one I remember:
Q: “Why do Trabbis have rear window defrosters?”
A: “To keep your hands warm while you push them home”
Even back then “The Turks” were a problem. Supposedly immigrated to “do the jobs regular Germans wouldn’t do”.
Under communism, even Germans make bad cars.
One of communists’ fondest wishes is to force everyone to drive the same car, to live in the same kind of apartment, and to earn about the same amount of money.
Except for the Nomenklatura, the ruling party elite, which had everything it wanted.
The soviet union had the Lada. Yugoslavia had the Yugo.
Walk through any parking lot today. Every possible car make and model is represented. Leftists hate that! They don’t want you to drive a better car than me. That’s why they pretend to tax “gas guzzlers” and are promoting the “self driving” car.
The discussion should not be about how bad a car it was. It should be about the fact that the regime forced it upon the people to establish “equality.” And today’s leftists will do the very same thing, if allowed.
Yes but with one important difference. It will be electric and recharged with a hand crank or pedal powered generator.
Drive for 10 minutes, recharge for two hours.
In all fairness, Saturn made some pretty good cars. In fact, I once read an article about a review of a new (at the time) vehicle that had no branding on it at all. Reviewers loved it and thought it was a BMW or Mercedes. Turned out to be a Saturn (one of their last models). After they badged it, they put it up for reviews again. No one liked it.
It wasn’t the Ford Pinto????
Don’t forget the Chevette... Ew!
Yugo??
And the 2CV?
I had a chance to buy one of those back in 1994 in Germany. The guy only wanted 100 DMs for it... And it ran.
I should have, but seriously, no way would I give up my US pickup truck to ship THAT back to the States, since I could only ship one vehicle.
I went to Dresden shortly after reunification and there were a lot of those awful 3-wheel Citroens being driven. Meanwhile, you go west and everyone was driving BMW’s and Mercedes, which are the common cars in West Germany. These days, there is very little difference between east and west, except that Skoda cars made in the Czech Republic are respectable.