From the jokes it just sticks out that Russian cars are of very poor quality and there are commentators who, foaming at the mouth, prove that this is so. I repeat: you can regret this, but you will not go anywhere - the mass of ignorant people by quality means a stupid increase in engine power, the absence of breakdowns and "bells and whistles."
Meanwhile, the main quality of a car is the ability to take you from point A to point B at minimal cost.
I wrote that in the days of the USSR, Soviet cars were quite willingly bought in the West. The question arises - it turns out that there were fools in the West who did not understand the advantages of high-quality Renault cars over low-quality Zhiguli? Let's talk about fools and what fools understand by the mysterious word "quality".
Let's look at the quality first from the perspective of literacy or the general culture of a person. There are literate people who have received knowledge at school or in practice that gives them the opportunity to understand the structure of a car - people who are able to perform at least basic repairs for it themselves, operate the car safely and economically. And there are, so to speak, blondes who have memorized words at school, without understanding what these words mean, who absolutely do not understand either how a car works or how to repair it in an elementary case.
Accordingly, for a literate person, some kind of minor breakdown is just an annoying nuisance, but for a blonde it is a tragedy. Hence, for a low-cultured person, quality is when nothing ever breaks, even if you stupidly do everything necessary to make it break.
Is it possible to build, say, a Zhiguli that will never break down? Yes, elementary! Soviet planes, by the way, were more reliable than Western ones, our spaceships fell less often than American ones, well, what problem was it in making a car unbreakable? But for this, this car had to be much more expensive in production, and the more reliable you want to make the car, the disproportionately faster the costs would grow.
Do you want to make reliable electrical wiring? No problem - gold plated silver contacts. Do you want to keep a competent regime in motion? No problem - put the computer on. Once I had a Zaporozhets, I don't even remember how its engine worked - I never paid attention to it. And at Yuri Luzhkov, I read that he, it turns out, paid attention to this.
Spent several days disassembling the engine and adjusting the weight of all moving parts. He assures that after that his engine did not rattle, but rustled. Could this have been done at the factory? Yes, no problem, only for this it was necessary to purchase scales and put another worker or workers into the conveyor and, accordingly, raise the price of the car. Not to mention that these workers could instead of this debugging, which only Luzhkov needed, build, say, apartments that everyone needed. It was possible to use especially strong alloyed and expensive steel on the structure of the car, especially strong, therefore, expensive materials.
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Grabin had in his memoirs that the Main Artillery Directorate of the Red Army (fools or enemies?) Demanded that his battalion's barrel withstand 10,000 rounds. Grabin used a specially alloyed steel and achieved the required survivability. After the war, with great difficulty they found a cannon, which went through the whole war and survived. She managed to make only 3.5 thousand shots. And if they had put a simpler barrel with a survivability of 2 thousand rounds, then how would they have managed to strengthen the armor of tanks, which also needs alloying!
It was possible to build cars with the reliability of the West, but why? To satisfy the blondes of the USSR? And who said that cars were built for them? And the blondes, by the way, had nothing to be offended at - trams were built for them. Do blondes have any complaints about trams, buses, metro?
Soviet cars in the USSR were sold at prices three times higher than the cost, respectively, they, most likely, were very inexpensive in the West. Accordingly, those cultured people in the West who bought them, in addition to Soviet cars, had the opportunity to buy an apartment, take a vacation on the Cote d'Azur, etc., etc. Well, while Western blondes were forced to buy Renault or "Mercedes".
And now the other side of the question. Man descended from an animal and the instincts of the animal are preserved in him, in particular, the instinct not to be the last in the pack. It is understandable - otherwise the sexual partners will not pay attention to you. However, a person is still a person, and the way for him not to be the last in society is to win a place for himself with intelligence, efficiency, high moral qualities.
And if this is nothing, if you are a stupid and lazy parasite? Then it remains to declare about yourself as the animal declares - externally, that is, show off. Establish yourself at the expense of something that others do not have. It's good to buy yourself a Ferrari, but no, you can dye your hair green. You can buy a Rollex watch for yourself, build an estate, in the end, lower your pants below your knees. And today's cars are no longer a means of transportation - they are a means of showing off worthless people. The main amount of costs for them is not intended to move a person from point A to point B, the bulk of the costs are show off.
This, of course, applies not only to the car, but to almost everything. We put down, before perestroika, common sense flashed - they started talking about packaging goods, and even then, from the point of view of environmental protection. There was information that in Sweden milk was delivered to stores in cisterns, and the Swedes are buying it in cans. But soon everything died out. Today the price of a box of chocolates is half the cost - the box itself. In cigarettes the cost of packaging is 70%. Who needs it? They will tell me - it's convenient! Not. This is, first of all, despicable! If we spent the resources of the planet on our own, albeit a comfortable life, this would not go far, but we spend them on show off and garbage, and this is extremely mean in relation to future generations.
Let's finish considering the issue of the quality of the car. Quality is what the consumer needs, and nothing more. Anything else is quality degradation. In the USSR, a passenger car for travel to work, and especially on a visit (how to drink ?!) was completely unnecessary, since we had excellent public transport. In general, the purpose of the car was recreation. Wild shores of the Crimea or the Caucasus, especially fishing and hunting. In short, our vehicles were designed for off-road driving.
And here you need to know that for a Western person, off-road is a dirt road without a hard surface. And even their military equipment is designed mainly for such "off-road" (it is appropriate to recall the Germans in 1941). And in the Russian sense, "road" is where the Russian wants to go. And our cars, especially "Zaporozhets", "Moskvich" and, of course, "Niva" are SUVs, and imported SUVs are off-road.
In short, for a blonde with a show off, our cars are a bucket of nuts, and for a smart guy with a penchant for satisfying hunting excitement, this is what the doctor attributed.
True, I wrote all this about Soviet cars, I will be careful not to say anything about Russian ones.
Yu. Mukhin