My UAZ-469b is from before 1985 (it was first registered with “Western” European plates the 1st of January 1988), and was originally purchased by a German (after the reunification of Germany) from the former army of the DDR, and was then sold in 1995 to a former French Mirage pilot, and when I purchased it from him it had been standing most of its time in storage.
My UAZ:
Some insignificant rubber parts had to be replaced, but other than that it was in perfect condition. The paint had fallen off parts of the car, exposing the bare metal underneath to the elements, but still: there was no rust whatsoever on the frame or body! The car stood parked in the rain like that for some time, after I had purchased it, and before I had the time to paint it, and there was still no rust.
I own a Soviet designed, but Russian made, Lada Niva as well, purchased brand new in 2010, and if any metal from that car is not covered by paint it will start to rust in a matter of hours. Even if the car itself is parked in a garage. So from the moment I got the Niva, I have been working hard to keep the rust away. I regularly check the car, and when I find some rust I remove it, with steel brushes, sand paper and acid, and then paint over with special anti-corrosion paint. This however, is a losing battle, because there are so many inaccessible parts of a car. What about rust inside the frame? What about the inside of the body? It is just a matter of time before my dear Lada Niva will die from this ‘car cancer’.
My Lada Niva:
So why is there such a big difference between these two cars? I asked my good friend Anton, a Russian, and he said simply that the Soviet Union made cars that were intended to last, and Russia is instead doing it the capitalist way, and trying to save money by using cheap materials and by not treating the metal parts in the car properly. So I learned something: you can, if you wish, make a car that will not rust… almost no matter what. I also learned that they don’t do that: not in Russia or elsewhere in Europe, not in the USA, not in Japan, not anywhere.
Why not?
Naturally the UAZ-469b, the standard Soviet military 4×4 for decades, is not perfect; it is crudely made, and we can assume also that some incompetence has influenced both its design and its construction. Any flaws it may have though, are unintentional. The car was intended to last forever. It was designed to be as good as possible, to be reliable and to be easily repaired if broken. (Had it been designed and made in Germany, with the same ideology behind it, it probably would have been the best car ever….)
Thankfully, the Lada Niva too was designed in the Soviet Union, but it is a civilian car, so less effort was made to make it last forever, and my Niva is made in capitalist Russia, and therefore it is of inferior quality compared to my UAZ.
So again: why is it the case that everything we can buy in our world today is of poor quality at best? I invite you to learn the truth about this, and you can by watching the documentary linked to here. I strongly recommend that you do. It will probably change your perception of capitalism, consumerism and the world we live in.
(Just ignore the last 5 minutes or so of Marxist propaganda.)
A little video about my UAZ:
