Who said it was only the Yugo that crawled its way into Western Europe? Here's a list of all the communist cars I can think of that were ever sold in Britain:
Lada 1200/1300/1600, Lada Riva, Lada Samara, Moskvich 408/412, Skoda 1000MB, Skoda Estelle/Rapid, Skoda Favorit, Dacia Denem, Dacia Duster (a.k.a. Aro 10), FSO 125p, FSO Polonez, Yugo 45/55/56, Yugo 311/411/511, Yugo Sana.
Bear in mind this means that this is only the list of cars that were built in right-hand-drive! So it doesn't include the Trabants, Wartburgs, Syrenas and anything else that stayed on the continent but not necessarily behind the Iron Curtain. And of all those, the least rejectful (as I said) were the Skoda Favorit and Yugo Sana, first launched as the cracks started to appear in the communist regimes and launched this side of the channel as the people of the people's workers' paradise were in open rebellion against it. The Yugo 45/55/65 series, based on the Fiat 127, was launched a bit earlier, in 1983 - the year the 127 was replaced by the Uno, so the Serbian challenger wouldn't tread on the toes of its sharp-suited Italian boss. Even so, it put up a better fight than any other Eastern Bloc car did until the arrival of the Favorit.
A goldmine out there for car nerds is Trigger's Retro Road Tests, which does exactly what it says on the tin - scanned articles of road tests from car magazines. Some go as far back as the 1950s, but most are 1970s-1990s, and track the progress of the communists' attempts to overthrow decadent Western capitalism with its cars (or, to put it another way, to bring a bit of much-needed decadent Western capitalist cash into the socialist workers' paradise after it became obvious that "we don't need money to function" just didn't wash).
Here's an early one from 1975 in which the newly-launched Polski-Fiat 125p goes up against its closest British opposition - the bare-bones base model Ford Escort Popular - and the base-model Honda Civic, at a time when Japanese cars still weren't accepted as much more than a cheap joke (they passed that baton to their Korean neighbours in the 1980s). At the time the 125p was a nine-year-old design and had been built in Poland for eight of those years - the Escort was hot off the press but Ford's meat-and-potatoes engineering meant the 1975 MkII owed rather a lot to the original 1968 MkI and the Escort/125p test was, in all reality, a fair one - and the Escort Popular was the cheapest car it was possible to buy until the Pole arrived to undercut it.
This test from 1985 weighs up the merits of the FSO Polonez, Skoda Estelle, Lada Riva and Yugo 513 against each other, aimed at the impoverished motorist with little money to spend who doesn't want to brave the minefield - as it was at the time - of the used car dealer. For the same price as these communist clunkers it
was possible to buy a three-year-old Escort or Astra, but clocking was rife and there was little way of checking the car's condition and mileage were genuine; buy a new Lada, for instance, and you've at least got the peace of mind of no hidden history and a year's warranty. The verdict, for those who knew what they were getting was: you'd be OK with the Yugo and wouldn't be completely laughed at, the Lada would at least be barely tolerable, but don't touch the other two with a barge pole. Likewise,
another earlier test from 1983 had compared the four marques above - same models, except for the FSO 125p instead of the Polonez - alongside Korean opposition, the Hyundai Pony (which must have been an absolute scream in Cockney East London, if you see what I mean). Much the same conclusion was drawn; the stand-out car of the five was the Hyundai, but it was significantly more expensive, thus not challenging the Eastern Bloc's trump card - the rock-bottom price. Even so, the Yugo again came out on top of the communist cars, being the least ancient of the designs.
Eastern cars sold to people who could afford no more, so occasionally there was another test against Western opposition that was equally cheap. So, in 1984,
with an innovative test scoring system, the Skoda Estelle and Lada Riva - stodgy old designs derived from a 1950s Renault and a 1960s Fiat - challenged France's "peasant's car", the Citroen 2CV, still being built after 40 years, and Britain's answer to the French "voiture sans permis", the Reliant Rialto, with one wheel conspicuously missing. The test was to find exactly how much quality motoring could be extracted from bargain-basement cars; tellingly, even the Daihatsu Domino, Japan's "kei car" designed mainly for its domestic market to pack as much into as small a package as possible, was considered too expensive! To make the test between these vastly different cars fair, the reviewers decided that a score of 10 represented that the car was as good as a Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6 GL, which pretty much represented "Mr. Average" (a Ford Sierra of the same spec would most likely have done the same job). Meanwhile, a score of 0 represented the abilities of the Fiat 126, the tiny, cheap and incompetent Italian which the reviewers loathed (though its predecessor, the 500, was practically sanctified). The cars were driven in heavy London traffic, blasted down the M4 at full belt all the way to Wales, then driven through some challenging mountain roads - in winter, where the Welsh weather was exactly as you'd expect. No prizes for guessing which car was given a horrifying rating for handling. There was no Yugo in this test, the Lada being chosen to represent "the old Fiat-derived designs", but likely as not, you could apply the same ratings in this test; just remember that the Yugo would be a smaller car costing slightly more and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Finally, the later years; communism may have fallen in Eastern Europe but its cars lived on.
How could they compete in 1994? So the not-entirely-rejectful Skoda Favorit and the still very nasty Lada Samara were put up against what they could live against on price - our good old Mini, 35 years old but still built because people kept buying it (14 years after the Metro was supposed to have seen it off) - and the Fiat Cinquecento, the newcomer of the four, launched in 1992 and built in post-communist Poland. As with the oddball test above, there was an obvious difference in size - the Skoda and Lada were about the same size as a MkII Golf, whereas the Mini and Fiat were in the smallest sector of the market. The conclusion was that you could either have space or quality - though by this time, it was clear VW's involvement with Skoda was paying off; the 1994 Favorit was right on the brink of unrejectification, and was about as un-communist as a car could be for something launched in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Next year it was replaced by the Felicia, and the rest is history.
By 1994, of course, Yugo was done and dusted in Western Europe; Yugoslavia had ripped itself apart in a civil war that made the News At Ten for all the wrong reasons, and sales of the Sana stopped here in 1993. Trigger doesn't have a road test of the Sana, but Top Gear does - in its old days, when it was still a consumer-based magazine programme.
Tiff Needell tested it in 1990 - and found it to be a tolerable car to live with, not without its shortcomings, but certainly a huge improvement on what Eastern Europe had come up with before.
In 1986, of the three "attempt at a modern design" communist cars - the Skoda Favorit, Lada Samara and Yugo Sana - only the Lada had been launched and would not reach the UK until November 1987. This meant bargain-basement Eastern Bloc motoring was limited mostly to the 1960s designs inherited from Fiat. If you thought it was only the current incarnation of Top Gear that spoke its mind about terrible cars, think again. Long-term TG anchorman William Woollard was considered to be the antithesis of Jeremy Clarkson (even though the two worked together from 1989-92) but even he was
utterly blunt about the abilities of what the East had to offer. Fast forward three years to 1989, the Favorit's been launched, and
Chris Goffey gave it (mostly) the thumbs up. If anything, it comes across in his review as a better car than the Sana did a year later.
So, I have given you all the evidence I can dig out of what I've known is out there for many months. Decide for yourselves which of the Eastern Bloc cars were tolerable enough to live with against the Western competition, and which were nasty heaps of hateful junk that were better off being shot by East German border guards as they attempted to jump the Berlin Wall. And don't forget we made more than a few horrors ourselves.
) and it just feels great as Moore's send-off after all of it. Also he's 57 in it. That alone is hilarious.
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