Cars Made In The Eastern Bloc

SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA- SEPTEMBER, 29 (RUSSIA OUT) A stuntman with LADA Estate car jumps into the Baltic Sea during the exercises of Russian Emercom Ministry units shown at the International congress Road Safety for the Safety of Life in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on September, 29, 2016. (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images) /

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The Soviet Union controlled Eastern Bloc is a group of Communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe that included the USSR, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Poland among others. The Soviet controlled Eastern Bloc started at the end World War II and died in 1991 when the Berlin Wall fell.

Those countries were not known for developing superior quality goods and they largely avoided any exports to non-Communist countries. This is a good and bad thing for car people.

Good because we didn’t have to worry about poorly engineered and produced cars that were the butt of many jokes.

Why has the new Trabant been launched with two exhaust pipes?

So you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

The bad aspect was that it took until the early 1990s to have those aforementioned poorly engineered and produced cars available to drive and enjoy. Westerners still love the Chevy Corvair and we all know that it is “Unsafe At Any Speed” and there are probably a few people out their that still embrace the Ford Pinto, despite issues with the fuel tank.

The following slides are some proper examples of Eastern Bloc cars:

(Please note: I will refrain from any political diatribes in this post. Lets focus on the cars and not the oppressive nature of the Eastern Bloc).

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