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Well… the flying car has no passenger seats, can’t be driven on roads, has a 2-3 second air supply, and takes about an hour to recharge. Doubtful
This is stupid
Eastern Block cars definitely didn’t have the reputation of working well. They were more known to be easy to repair, but they had to be since shit broke constantly lol
Skoda still has that reputation amount older people now, despite them probably being really good.
Meanwhile Alfa Romeo coasting under the radar despite being among the most unreliable pieces of shit out there.
Yes, but for Eastern Europeans especially the Russians, quality IS about being repairable. Both the West and East have different perception of what quality is, but both still strive for quality.
Plenty of old Western cars are pretty repairable too, while not constantly breaking down. The non-repairabilit, is a more recent trend. Many forget that communism in Europe collapsed almost 4 decades ago. Things changed in general a lot since then.
Yeah, I’m not sure I’d credit the economic system with repairability or blame it for unreliability.
To use WW2 as a measurement point: western allied vehicles tended to be extremely repairable. Eastern allied vehicles were also extremely repairable. Western vehicles tended to have closer tolerances for parts, meaning a part could be damaged easier. Eastern tended to have simpler parts, meaning they could be repaired. Western vehicles were geared towards modular components and ease of replacement, so you could swap an engine in 20 minutes or spend an afternoon building a new tank out of two that had been destroyed, even if one was a different model. The Eastern tanks tended to have a more intensive overhaul process, and less shared components between models.
Nazi machines were a shit show with custom parts, low repairability, and poor workmanship. I have no idea why people give them credit for good engineering. Jets are cool, but useless if you can’t fuel or fix them. Advanced engine systems are great, but you can’t repair them and they explode under stress. Ornate and bespoke parts are cool until they’re produced by slaves who do the minimum to avoid death and it warps, leaving you without hope of replacement, no ability to scrap the damn thing, and an enemy who can repair their tanks by either sufficiently motivating a tree trunk into an axle or by using three cars to build a new tank to factory spec over lunch.You’ve got America turning car manufacturers into weapons builders: stellar. Mass production and modularization with a skilled assembly line.
You’ve got the UK having people build machine guns in their basements from simple plans. Wicked little death traps.
You’ve got the soviets dictating material allocation and design priorities.The common factor to the good design is the workers distance to design feedback.
The easier it is for a person doing the work to correct how the work is done, the faster the design will iterate and the better it will get.
That feedback loop can be good or bad regardless of the specific economic model.Hell, duck tape was the result of an ammunition factory worker thinking the tape they were using for ammo boxes was stupid and would get her sons killed, so she wrote the president. He didn’t understand in the least, but gave it to the war production board and told them to Fix The Problem, which they did.
Conclusion: if you want good shit, have the people building it tell you how to fix it. Repeatedly.
And don’t use fucking slave labor, it’s unethical and bad manufacturing.
I’m more talking about the OP posts “car that works” than quality. A car that’s constantly having shit breaking isn’t exactly something I’d call a “car that works” even when it’s easier to repair
Btw, it’s Eastern Bloc, not block. I’m sure autocorrect is to blame, but it seems like neat trivia regardless.
Why is that? Does it come from a Russian word translation? Does it mean something different?
Nope, it’s a French loan word. In English and French, a bloc is a political group. The original French meaning was a block, like a block of wood or cheese, and that meaning is still used, but came to also mean political group or alliance at some point. When it was imported into English, we only kept the political meaning since we already had block.
That’s the useless, but interesting answer I was looking for. Thanks.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bloc
Like all quirks of English the French are to blame.
East block West block, small block big block. Communism and democracy are cars; capitalism and socialism are engines.
Thats a W123 Mercedes-Benz.
Small correction, the left is a capitalist-made vehicle. This fine sample is a communist one. These are still in active use in many places 40+ years after production. Cheap and simple to maintain.
It didn’t take much thinking to realize flying cars a) already existed in the form of small planes and helicopters (what’s so special about a car-shaped aircraft?) and b) is a terrible idea for the mass market because people already suck at driving on the ground and frankly driving licenses should be harder to get and keep.
And this is especially bad coming from Tesla, a company that earned its reputation for shit quality, over promising and under delivering, though still delivering despite it not even being ready (safe) for the market.
Communism or Capitalism don’t make things better or worse. Corruption makes things worse and regulations and oversight make them better.
Endless stories about garbage made on both sides leads to some rich fucker rigging the system.
I mean we never had communism in the UK, but we built solid reliable council housing from the 60s to the 80s.
Turns out if the government is going to be on the hook for a bad job, they tend to do it right. No point cheaping out on materials if you’re going to be the one coming back to replace the roof in ten years time when it starts to leak.
Can say the same for miljonprogrammet here in Sweden. I live in such a flat, it’s been refreshed, and it’s hella cosy. Built sturdy as hell, think it’d survive a nuke.
We’re facing a housing crisis again, and another one of these would be nice. Buut we all know that won’t happen since housing is an investment, an asset, and the crisis makes it more valuable.
People not having access to housing is making the capitalist class more money.
I’d say one downside with those buildings is that sound travels really easily between neighboring apartments and they often tend to get quite cold in the winter, although I’m not sure how other buildings from the same time period compare.
Definitely beats being homeless though.
I don’t really have that problem with my flat. I can hear the baby downstairs when he cries loudly, but that’s about it. Haven’t heard any other neighbours.
I worry greatly that I’m audible. x3
Both make things worth. If you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, I can thoroughly recommend James Scott’s book Seeing Like A State. Not many more clear eyed views of the recent history of social structures around.
I will second the recommendation.
I mean, wasn’t that the original intention of the post? I read the op pictured as “both bad” but at least the commies can try to fix the engine.
Nah, bro has the blue mark of shame.
There’s a reason why soviet era technology was infamous for its use of
plywoodstalinium.There’s also a reason why post industrial american technology is infamous for its use of
chinesiumtotally legit made in USA stickers.People are gonna hate this answer but the best products are made in a properly competitive market.
The USSR had state owned OEMS that ultimately relied on deals with foreign manufacturers to jump start their success significantly later than their international counterparts.
The big 3 US OEMs lobbied congress to block foreign imports to protect their inferior product in the home market (multiple times, notably against Japan and recently China).
People are gonna hate this answer but the best products are made in a properly competitive market.
Yep, that. Protectionism leads to worse results for everyone except a handful of people who profit in the short term. Long-term, even the companies whose immediate profits are being protected will suffer as they make worse quality products that eventually no one wants to buy. Only the people who are in a position to grab some profits and run get any benefit.
Capitalism, socialism, communism, whatever, doesn’t matter.
Protectionism literally helped South Korea and China become technologically advanced. One of the ways for developing countries to actually make progress is to own their own market via protectionist policies. Whatever you said is just plain wrong.
The kicker… They call themselves “The alliance for automotive innovation” Gives me some distinct 1984 vibes because they haven’t made any meaningful innovations in decades, and now instead of paying $12,000 for a car that charges in 9 minutes… I have to pay $29,000 for a car that charges in 30 minutes 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
You can have a competitive market under socialism! The main difference is the profits don’t get hoovered off by a parasitic investor class that don’t actually provide any meaningful labour.
Yeah, exactly. People think capitalism means competition, but that’s not a great definition of it. It means capital gets to call the shots and keep the profits, even when they’re not doing any meaningful work.
You could have any number of companies competing that are worker owned.
Rights to repair hurts the bottom line of shareholders, its evil, communistic and socialistic!!!
The second step is to muzzle the intelligent
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/explosive-elon-musk-film-hit-003620107.html
“fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.” - Bertrand Russel
Have you done any research in communest cars? I like shitting on capitalism as much as the next guy but cumunist cars were unreliable as fuck.
The Lada Riva. That symbol of communism.
Was just a rebadged Fiat 124.
It was originally a capitalist invention that the commies took credit for.
If you haven’t seen already most if not all of USSR technology was stolen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if tradition continued to Russia
Learning is not stealing… That aside. There were a bunch of FIAT license cars in the socialist states.
Getting help from your buddy to figure something out in class isn’t the same as copying their answers. There is nothing inherent in that design that makes it more reliable, so why do the two cars look exactly the same?
Learning is not stealing, but stealing is also not learning.
The USSR officially licenced FIAT’s cars, so much so that FIAT engineers planned and helped build the production line in Tolyati itself. Also the Soviet version had some stronger bits in order to withstand the bad roads in the rural areas.
In general one cannot merely copy a car design and mass produce it at scale and up to quality. Half if not most of the know-how for mass producing a car that actually runs and lasts is within the manufacturing processes. From exact metal alloys, specifics of forging processes, machining processes, the actual tooling for all those, to coating materials, paints, etc.
I particularly enjoy the “stolen technology” line about Russia and China, because it’s a tacit admission that capitalism works by keeping people deliberately poor and miserable so that a profit can be extracted from them.
Yeah, a communist Mercedes Benz W123. Even an AI slop meme would be better than this.
A Spectacle for Fools.
I’m just replying here because I want to remember that phrase. That’s probably the best way I have read to describe Musk’s “flying car”.
