[alfa] Russian rust

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George Graves comments on rusty cars and Soviet Bloc steel: "in the '60's and '70's the Italian government was dominated by Communists. It's this Communist government who made deals with Soviet Bloc nations to exchange trade goods. One of the "fruits" of these collaborations was that Fiat got to sell the rights and know-how to allow various Soviet countries to build obsolete Fiat models under license. The Russkies built Fiats and called them Moskvitch, The Poles built Fiats and called them "Polonaise", the Czechs built Fiats and called them Skodas (for a while), and the Yugoslavs, built Fiats and.... well, you get the picture."
 
Just as Henry Ford had done forty years earlier in the early thirties Fiat did enter a broad collaboration with the Russian government to build a factory, train workers, and produce a more rudimentary version of the Fiat 124, appropriately modified for Russian environmental and economic conditions  not obsolete but simplified versions with increased ground clearance, drum brakes, detuned engines, and more basic interiors. The factory, Volszhkji Avtomobilnji Zavod, at the newly renamed Volga river town of Togliatti, (named indeed for the former head of the Italian Communist Party) produced the first Fiat-based east zone car, the VAZ 2101, starting in August 1970. I did not find a date or chronology for the agreement or for the exchange of Russian steel, but the logic of the discussion would suggest that the rusting problems of Italian cars either did or did not become substantially worse after 1970 than they had been in the late fifties and early sixties prior to Fiat's involvement in developing the VAZ complex. I have stated my doubts, but each observer is entitled to an opinion. Enjoy yours-
 
On the Skoda question, it appears that Skoda was an appreciably older company than Alfa. The only reference I found to Skoda building a design licensed from another company was Hispano-Suiza in the mid-twenties; the other strongest and longest-lived similarity seemed to have been to the Austro-Daimlers designed by Ferdinand Porsche in the late twenties and early thirties, with front engines, backbone frames, and rear drive with swing axles. I didn't find anything which looked like, sounded like, or was said to be a Fiat derivative, but that doesn't mean there weren't any. Some of the postwar models were rear-engined, for which Tatra would have been a sufficient local precedent.
 
All this is not strongly on-topic, but blaming what were apparently long-standing chronic problems of certain Italian cars on outsourced materials runs some risk of misunderstanding the actual nature and character of the subjects. It may not matter; perhaps as Henry Ford is said to have said, "History is bunk." Many think so. Some still find it interesting, and occasionally useful.
 
Cheers
John H
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