With a hint of exaggeration we can say that cars today are made to completely disintegrate the moment the warranty expires. The car producers don’t even want to make good cars; they just want to make money, so they make absolute crap that looks very nice and is very comfortable, and is very “environmentally friendly”, and then when a few years have gone by they want you to buy a new one (and the “environmentally friendly” car that they spent a lot of polluting energy to produce becomes polluting garbage). There is more money for them to do it this way than it is for them to make good cars.
Another problem with modern cars is the one you as a consumer have when it breaks down (and it will, at least when the warranty expires). It is close to impossible to fix anything in a modern car. You can barely change tyres yourself, and you can certainly not change a broken light bulb; you need a professional car mechanic for such a task – and the money to pay for this complex operation.
To sum it up: modern cars are designed to break down after a short while and you can not fix them yourself when they do. They are mere consumer goods.
The Soviet Union was a Communist regime, with very little talent for making money or for having the type of Capitalist ideas that car producers have today. The Soviet Union was also famous for caring more about the military than for anything else, so whilst people in general apparently had very little, the military cruised around in high quality vehicles (well, at least in vehicles made from high quality materials). Further, they made these cars for soldiers, in other words; they made these cars pretty idiot-proof! Even the average conscript was supposed to be able to fix things that broke.
Knowing this I figured I would solve my problem with cars by buying a military car made in the Soviet Union. Not a military car designed in the Soviet Union and made in (Capitalist…) Russia, but a care made in the Soviet Union. So I went ahead and purchased a Soviet-made UAZ 469b military 4×4, as a family car: it has 7 seats, it is idiot-proof and it is made of steel of such high quality that it is completely rust free, even 25 years after it was made! Even parts where the paint have fallen off have no rust whatsoever! Compared to my (Capitalist) Russian-made Lada Niva this is a dream! My Niva even rusts standing dry in my garage (and I am beginning to give up keeping the rust away with acid, sand paper, anti-rust paint etc.)!
Now, the UAZ 469b is not a typical dream car. Some don’t like it… Pretty much everything in the car is (high quality!) steel, and there is no insulation whatsoever, so it is the most noisy car I have ever driven before (and I commonly drive a Lada Niva…). The comfort is… absent. There are no seat belts for the back seats, but I plan on installing some of those. The door handles don’t work very well (who am I kidding? Only one of them actually works as it should…), and if I turn on the wind-shield wipers it sounds as if I am sitting inside the engine compartment of a jet… it is a little bit thirsty as well, and the gear box sounds as if someone has thrown a handful of rocks inside it if I go faster than 50 kph, and maximum cruising speed is around 70 kph… I might stay away from the motorways in this one.
But!
Even I — a writer/musician — can fix just about everything myself, and the parts are so cheap you laugh every time you pay for them (and you don’t often need to do that either). My 25 year-old Soviet car is still in perfect condition. It has no warranty. Close to no electronics. It is made for the Soviet military and insane offroad driving, and I use it as a family car on the road. It will last forever.
How the average Russian drives his UAZ:
My own UAZ (with freshly repaired wind shield):
Buy only old and used cars when you buy a new car for yourself. The older the better. The more primitive they are the better; the less fancy features they have the better (remember: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong”). Always repair old cars if you can rather than buy a new one. It is that simple. If you do this you will suffer so much less from car trouble than if you buy a new car. Let the car manufacturers sell no more of their modern garbage! Force them to either start making good cars again or force them to go bankrupt! HailaR WôðanaR!
