In the mid 1950s, airplanes evolved into large jetliners and airports had to find more powerful vehicles to tow them around. In the Soviet Union, one solution was to build a large two-driver sedan-bodied tow car with the engine out of a tank, and it was probably the biggest sedan in the world.
The Simpsons has given us a surprising amount of automotive-related cultural icons, including the Powell Motors Homer, the Canyonero, and even Homer’s own Plymouth Junkerolla. My favorite Simpsons car, though, may be the most mysterious: the strange, tiny car from a no-longer-extant country that a man named Crazy…
I’m not even going to pretend like I’m not a sucker for a cute car. I am, and I don’t care who knows it. Whatever miserable set of bad ideas I have rattling around in my head that define my self-image, they allow me to appreciate a genuinely adorable vehicle, and this VAZ E1101 prototype may be one of the cutest…
Do you have recurring fantasies about transforming a humble Isetta into an octo-wheeled behemoth that can drive over or through anything, even water? And using that beast to make everyone who’s ever crossed you pay? Of course you have; you’re human. You’re also in luck, because such a vehicle exists, and it’s been…
Syd Mead is something of a legend when it comes to designing how the future will look. From the grim, cluttered dystopia of Blade Runner to the well-cushioned and clean office-spaceships of Star Trek to the cybernetic metropolises of Tron, Mead is perhaps the best-known designer of the future. What he’s much less…
It’s not widely known, but for a very brief period in the early 1950s, the Cold War was being fought with massive, bulbous slabs of cyclopean automotive futurism: the first concept cars. Before the Space Race got started, America and the Soviet Union squared off behind panoramic windshields and huge steering wheels. …
Just imagine you lived in a world where you were still you — a gearhead, devastatingly sexy, lover of cars, charming — but there were no interesting cars for you to buy, at all. What would you do? C0mplain? Punch a wall? If you were like this group of Soviet gearheads in the 1960s, you’d build your own damn car.
When you think of Soviet vehicles, what word comes to mind? Probably “shoddy.” Or “terrible.” Or “unreliable.” Maybe “garbage.”
Saying “world’s best” anything is a risky proposition, especially when it comes to something as holy as the station wagon. But, I think based on my somewhat idiosyncratic criteria, I have found the world’s best station wagons, and the one man with the vision to dream them, build them, and use them.
I’m sure many of you think the Soviets simply copied the Fiat 124 to create the Lada 1200 and all its numerous siblings, but now that we bought one, it’s time to show you how far that is from what happened.
Getting a car in the Soviet Union of the 1970s was very similar to not getting a car in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Most of the time was spent not having a car. Waiting lists could be a decade long, and most people just waited it out. But not Boris Karavkin, an artist from Minsk. He just built his own damn car.
If you thought Vector was responsible for the most ridiculous press shots in human history, just look at this British art piece depicting just your average day with the Lada 1200 4-door Saloon.
Look, this little ZAZ is getting up this concrete banking, dammit.
You're looking at a GAZ M20 'Pobeda,' one of the more iconic early Soviet cars. I don't really know if it's making a cool car comeback in Russia, but I don't really know what Russian gearheads are buying at all.
Think you've seen it all?
The first crews to clean up Chernobyl were called 'liquidators' and they received many, many benefits for their incomprehensibly dangerous work. Here is a very cruel, very Soviet description of one of those benefits explained by a liquidator at the site in 1986.
Here's the LuAZ 1302, an updated version of the older LuAZ 969. It is a sturdy, lovable little trucklet and I want one.
Normally, when we think of Soviet cars, we think of boxy, utilitarian cars that people waited years to get. We don't usually think of fun, despite the somewhat ironic way many of us covet these cars now. But that almost all changed, with a little known side effect of Perestroika that included fun cars. Cars like the…
Lenin may have equated Communism with the union of Soviet power and the electrification of the entire country, but surely he didn’t literally mean hooking everything up to the grid. His overeager disciples thought otherwise. Going through 60-year-old trade journals, nuclear physicist Miklós Tallián unearthed a bizarre…
