Uhhh… anyone who has ever driving in a Lada or a Niva can tell you they were not well-engineered machines. Quite the opposite!
Yes, it was possible to fix one with a hammer because well into the 1990’s they had barely any electronic components, but sit in one before you believe the truly bizarre take of this article.
Soviet consumer goods were _famously_ shitty. I don’t know what this writer is smoking. Not Soviet cigarettes for sure, since those also sucked.
They were well engineered for the purpose of being a cheap car that could be easily maintained and kept ready with the state of infrastructure and supply chains in the 1970s USSR. It's no 2010s Mercedes
Central planning crap can make great products for very, very narrow definition of "fine" that sometimes just so happens to line up with what someone needs. It's really crap at figuring out what to make or what combination of subjective attributes make for a thing people want.
The author is definitively smoking soviet paint factory fumes though.
But they didn’t even do the engineering work, right? The design was a copy of a 1960’s Fiat which was then never updated for 40 years.
This wasn’t a deliberate, careful choice by Gosplan to pick a car that would work well given the primitive state of the Soviet economy. Those crappy rust buckets were the best design that they could buy and implement from someone else.
There is occasionally weird nostalgia (or something like it) for certain aspects of the Soviet period and I do not get it at all!
They knew they weren't good at figuring out what balance of attributes complex things needed so they copied. It wasn't their first rodeo when it came to copying something "with design allowances for local reality". Way easier to copy and alter a Fiat than trust a committee to plan a car that is a hit.
I'm not well versed on the Fiat they copied but knowing how these things usually go I can see where they'd have made changes to fit their situation (e.g. revising trivial things to use off she shelf parts already known to be available in high volume, like the soviet equivalent of spec'ing a roller blade bearing instead an odd bearing).
There are a lot of cars of that era that are like the Lada in terms of features (or lack thereof), specs, ownership experience, etc. I don't think it's anything particularly specific about the Lada that makes people like it though certainly there's some things about it that makes people with a certain worldview want to like it more than they would otherwise. I think people are nostalgic for it because it was so prolific and well cared for (or at least they were maintained) because cars weren't treated as disposable by the people who had Ladas so that makes them easy to come by and keep using today. Basically it was a decent car that got lucky in terms of when and where it existed and who it was sold to that run into a lot of staying power.
I second this. You'd check your oil when driving to next town 50km away and if you decide to drive to country nearby you'd have to spend few weeks hardening everything.
Imagine Japanese cars from the period. You'd drive for 20kkm without oil change and will be sure it will start next morning at -20C.
I thought this article was interesting and in keeping with what I've seen posted on Hacker News. Do we know why it was flagged without comment after being upvoted?
The article is very interesting, but here's a point not discussed in the article: an old refrigerator is terrible for the environment! Its energy efficiency is low, and it is dangerous for the ozone layer: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/dec/08/science....
That old car must not have a catalytic converter either, a godsend for our environment.
Keeping old things around is good for the environment. Keeping an old fridge and car from the 60s, I'm not so sure.
That’s an interesting point about pretty much anything that converts energy into work: fuel efficiency and environmental safety aspects evolve over time. And yet you can’t really predict the right end-of-life for these things, either.
No planned obsolescence or failure sounds like respect for the consumer. I wonder how well their light bulbs held up.
Kind of ironic (intentional) that you brought up lightbulbs since the lightbulbs are the first known syndicate to establish and enforce planned obsolescence.
Regarding poor energy efficiency specifically: it has been observed than gains in efficiency of energy consumption actually cause further increases in energy consumption, rather than decreases, which is counterintuitive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
So, a refrigerator consumed 500kWh/year in 2010, compared to 2000kWh/year in 1972[1]. By 1944, 85% of households in USA already owned a refrigerator[2]. Refrigerator volume has also remained almost constant in the last 50 years. I don't think the paradox holds up in the case of refrigerators.
Resource consumption can increase in other ways. For example, since my refrigerator uses less electricity now, I might buy another computer, or TV, or second refrigerator...
Hilarious propaganda, can only work on people who never interacted with Soviet products. Real reason is you could only afford to buy it once in your lifetime with soviet earnings.
> But this longevity wasn’t just a matter of thrift. Soviet goods were more about quality than quantity.
"sixty percent of all apartment fires in Moscow are caused by mass-produced Soviet television sets, which had a tendency to explode. Of the 715 apartment fires in Moscow in November 1987, 90 were blamed on exploding television sets, a statistic the Soviet press viewed as an alarming commentary on Soviet technology."
I tend to do things that same way. I have a philosophy of "Buy twice as good. Buy half as many."
My cars I tend to buy new, but keep them for 12 years or more. The same with household appliances. Better ones last longer, and can be more economic to repair rather than replace.
My Miele dishwasher is approaching 16 years old. My Miele clothes-washer and heat-pump dryer I bought 12 years ago because I was so happy with my Miele dishwasher. All three have been repaired once during their lifetime but continue to work, and work well. Very likely they'll see me out.
I wonder why queuing physically was so common. When scarcity is so widespread you’d expect that at least that part would be solved some other way (rationing, queue numbers, ..)
The impression you get from history books is that people were literally queuing for hours not only for perishable things, but also as in the article for things like fur coats. How did people find out where and when the queue started for a fur coat? If the store was about to get a delivery of fur coats, couldn’t they have a lottery instead of endless queues?
Production motivated by use value naturally tends towards durability and efficient use of resources, just like production motivated by exchange value (profit) naturally tends towards fragility and waste.
Yes, it was possible to fix one with a hammer because well into the 1990’s they had barely any electronic components, but sit in one before you believe the truly bizarre take of this article.
Soviet consumer goods were _famously_ shitty. I don’t know what this writer is smoking. Not Soviet cigarettes for sure, since those also sucked.