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When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

remembersingapore.org

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Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#31

Post by somenameforme »

ACCount37 wrote: post #26
somenameforme wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manuals for the Lada were epic. In a quick search for an original one I came upon this [1] which is an English version one, which is even better than what I was looking for! It describes the entire car's operation and mechanism in extensive detail along with descriptions of how to replace parts, what might go wrong, and more. I'm not sure that 'just send it to the repair shop' was an overall improvement in societ…

Repair shops are a necessity. Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance. There are ways around t…

> Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance.

Why do you think? Outside of extremely rare disabilities, I do not understand why you would believe this.

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#32

Post by kakacik »

gsf_emergency_4 wrote: post #4
BohdanPetryshyn wrote: post #2

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

The related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...

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

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#33

Post by flohofwoe »

eru wrote: post #10
gsf_emergency_4 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...

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…

> the Trabi was actually made out of cheap plastic

Today it would be called an 'advanced composite material', e.g. it's closer to fiberglass than plastic and used recycled materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#34

Post by JSR_FDED »

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.

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#35

Post by ACCount37 »

somenameforme wrote: post #31
ACCount37 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repair shops are a necessity. Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance. There are ways around t…

> Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. Why do you think? Outside of extremely rare disabilities, I do not understand why you would believe this.

A lot of users have an extreme level of resistance to learning tech. Which applies even to the most simple of instruction-following operations.

They aren't clinically retarded. They could learn those things if someone forced them to. But you, as a product developer, can't force them. It's utterly impractical to overcome that resistance for a mass market product.

It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#36

Post by grishka »

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.

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#37

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #10
gsf_emergency_4 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The related Trabi (made of paper, some claim) have had their value multiplied https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/living/2024/03/27/trabb...

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…

[deleted]

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#38

Post by okaleniuk »

grishka wrote: post #36

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.

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!"

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#39

Post by Cthulhu_ »

janisorlovs wrote: post #14
jojobas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Which has now looped around because you can get cheap 'export' beer in grocery stores here (western Europe) which is pretty much guaranteed to be produced in the same breweries as the premium brands like Heineken. These breweries never stop producing because empty tanks are wasteful.

Re: When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads

#40

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #34

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 Sin…

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.

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