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1
In the early days of the car, it was
believed that the spread of this new
motoring fad would be limited
by our ability to train chauffeurs
and supply leather
for the upholstery.
Only the rich would have cars.
The rest of us just walked on.
But we, the shuffling masses,
had seen the cars.
And we saw that they were good.
This is the story of how
motoring came to the masses
how dictatorships
and democracies alike pursued
the dream of cars for all
.
.
of red herrings, seen here in
green, and automotive cul-de-sacs,
of shattered dreams
and the fall of the mighty.
This is how we fell in love
with our wheels.
Also, this happens.
'This week, totalitarian transport -
'the people's cars of the state
'and how some were
more equal than others.
'
Ow!
'But first, it's time to
slay a sacred cow.
'
The term "people's car" is a very
emotive one amongst car historians,
and most of them
would tell you that it all started
with this, the Ford Model T.
But then again,
wasn't it Henry Ford who said,
"History is more or less bunk"?
And I agree with him.
Adolf Hitler was not an engineer.
He was more of
a wildlife enthusiast.
"You only have to look at nature,"
he is alleged to have said,
"to see what streamlining is.
"
Herr Hitler sagte, mein Auto sollte
wie ein Kafer aussehen.
Mr Hitler said,
my car should look like a beetle.
For me, the Beetle is where the true
story of the people's car begins,
and because it was a social
initiative, not a business one.
Today, the Beetle is the world's
most recognisable car.
Over 21 million were made,
and it's the only car to have
its own Hollywood movie franchise.
But the Love Bug has a dark side.
The Beetle's beginnings
were mired in scandal, deceit, theft
and, let's not beat about the
bush here, crimes against humanity.
And like no other car in history,
the Beetle played a unique
political role in increasing
a dictator's control
over the lives of his people.
To begin with, the Beetle
wasn't even called a Volkswagen.
It was called
the Kraft durch Freude Wagen -
the strength through joy car.
Kraft durch Freude
was Hitler's ministry of
family leisure activities.
It was created to promote the joys
of living under a Nazi regime.
The KdF operated on a massive scale.
It built Titanic-sized
cruise liners
.
.
vast holiday complexes,
and laid on free trips
for the honest German family.
There were even nationwide
keep-fit clubs.
A little bit of morning exercise
with just a subtle
hint of bunting.
I don't want a holiday
in the sun
Hitler thought there should be
a car as well.
That would bring the state
right into the heart of everyday
family life.
The man entrusted with its design,
legendary engineer
Dr Ferdinand Porsche.
He's the one with the tache.
The KdF car would be
built in a vast new factory -
the Volkswagenwerk in Saxony,
and should, above all,
be affordable for the average
German worker.
And this is what he came up with -
the original
Kraft durch Freude Wagen.
And when I say original,
I mean very original.
This is the oldest running
Beetle in the world.
It's prototype number six,
and it was built by Dr Porsche
in his Stuttgart workshop
so strictly speaking,
since the Volkswagen factory
hadn't been finished yet,
this is a Porsche.
When you look at an original
prototype like this,
you can see exactly
what Hitler was on about.
It should look like a beetle
and it does,
it does look like a beetle.
Operate the semaphore indicators.
Now, obviously, it isn't fast,
it is actually quite noisy,
the steering is a bit wayward,
if somebody comes past in an Audi
at 150, I definitely feel it.
But, at the time, the KdF-Wagen
was quite something,
especially if you'd never been
in a car.
The hard-up German public
were utterly seduced by the promise
of owning their very own car.
After all, the Beetle was good
enough for the party bosses,
who, predictably,
got the first ones.
This actual KdF-Wagen I'm driving
went on to be the personal
car of Dr Robert Ley
who was head of
the Kraft durch Freude movement.
And, in essence,
he was the minister for fun.
Robert Ley was one of Hitler's
earliest supporters
and his KdF was instrumental
in keeping the German worker
sweet with the Nazi regime.
But, when he was not running
his vast empire of cruise liners
and holiday camps, he was involved
in camps of a very different kind.
His slave labour activities
resulted in the deaths of thousands.
He was going to be tried for
war crimes
along with the rest of them,
but he managed to hang
himself in his cell
before Albert Pierrepoint
could do the job for him.
This is genuinely disturbing.
I've driven a lot of strange cars
but I've never been in one that's
a genuine instrument of evil.
Apart from the G-Wiz.
I'd just like to make it clear
I'm very interested in his car,
but I don't share any political
views with Dr Robert Ley.
And the reason
I can't help but like the car
is because it's beautifully
well thought out.
The engine, as we know
from that joke about the nun
who thought hers had been stolen -
is in the back.
That means that all the noise
and all the fumes it produces
are left behind.
And, because there was no engine
in the front,
the nose could be rounded off.
The whole car approached
the ideal streamlined
half of a teardrop shape,
and streamlining was all the rage
in the 1930s.
But the KdF-Wagen wasn't designed
to be occupied by a solitary
German officer.
THEY SING
Much better.
This is what Hitler
built his Beetle for -
the long-haul Nazi family holiday.
THEY ALL SING
It wasn't just the car itself,
but the entire lifestyle around it
that Hitler and the KdF envisaged.
The *** family would have
as many children as possible
so the car would be suited to
a family of five.
They would drive in comfort
at 100kmh along the Autobahn
for four hours between stops
until they reached one
of the pre-determined KdF resorts.
What could be better?
The holiday atmosphere began
as soon as you climbed aboard.
This is Prora,
a 20,000-bed holiday camp
on the Baltic island of Rugen.
The Nazis got the idea
from Butlins
.
.
including the communal showers.
By putting away
a few pfennigs a week,
you could stay in your
well-appointed KdF seaside apartment
equipped with your very own
KdF radio.
HITLER SPEECH PLAYS ON RADIO
And by putting away a little more,
you too could arrive there
in Darth Vader's helmet.
Stylish, affordable, totalitarian.
The car cost 990 Reichsmarks.
The typical working German family
earned around 32 marks a week.
So, the rule was -
Funf Mark die woche musst du sparen,
willst Du im eigenen Wagen fahren.
"Five marks a week
must you put aside,
"if in your own car
you wish to ride.
"
So, savers bought
these five marks stamps
and stuck them in this Sparkarte,
a savings card.
When the card was full,
you could have your car.
But if you defaulted on just
one of these weekly payments,
the whole thing was forfeit.
But, really,
five marks a week was easy.
Even children could
contribute to the family car
with one of these KdF-Wagen
savings tins.
Look at this thing.
It is rather beautiful, isn't it?
The savings plan and
the lavish marketing driving it
proved irresistible.
By 1938, when the giant Volkswagen
factory finally came on line,
millions of Germans were
dutifully filling the KdF coffers
and the Nazis
had a hit on their hands.
The whole scheme
was rather brilliant.
A car, a radio, a holiday.
What innocent German citizen,
remembering all
the hyper-inflation of the 1920s,
wouldn't have bought into it?
I'd have bought into it.
There was only one tiny problem.
The whole Beetle savings scheme
was a giant con trick.
Hitler was secretly saving up
for something else entirely.
The war changed everything.
The Prora holiday camp never opened.
If there'd been a KdF customer
complaints line,
it would have had a longer queue
than *** Broadband's.
No-one received a Beetle -
none of the families who'd funded
that massive Volkswagenwerk factory
with all their scrimping
and saving.
If the Germans had actually
eaten kippers,
you could say they'd been
stitched up like one.
The great factory became
an engine room of the war effort.
The Beetle's versatile,
innovative chassis
was adapted to create two German
war vehicles -
the rugged all-terrain Kubelwagen
and the amphibious Schwimmwagen.
But it didn't stop at vehicles.
Russian and Jewish slave labour
were also forced to make Hitler's
secret weapon - the V-1 flying bomb.
So, unwittingly,
those honest hard-working
German Volk of the mid 1930s,
with their brightly coloured
cash tins and their saving stamps,
helped to demolish a row of houses
about a mile from
where I now live in London.
But, let's be positive,
at least it wasn't the chip shop.
The Allies soon identified
the factory
as the home to Hitler's flying bomb
and blew the place to bits.
And when the advancing Allied
ground forces took the factory
in April 1945,
the Nazi dream of the people's car
seemed well and truly buried.
So, when Major Ivan Hirst
of the British Army
arrived at the ruins of
Volkswagenwerk in 1945,
charged with putting a car into
production for the occupying forces,
the place was a bit of a mess.
But amongst the rubble,
or so the story goes,
he found the battered remains of
an odd beetle-shaped car.
He and his German colleagues
repaired it
and sent it off to the Army
for evaluation.
The message that came back was
an order for 20,000.
The qualities that Hitler
had demanded of his people's car -
ruggedness, simplicity,
ease of maintenance -
were just what the Army wanted.
But just when the British
had done the difficult bit
and got the Beetle back on track,
they and their American
Allies made the costliest blunder
in the history of car making.
The Beetle, the designs
and the factory itself
were offered to Western car
companies as a free war reparation.
But no-one wanted to know.
The chairman of Ford said
it wasn't worth a damn.
Britain's Lord Rootes
also turned it down.
his great automotive concern,
would produce its own
small rear-engined car
in the form of the Hillman Imp,
but that was liquid cooled
and plagued by overheating.
In the end, only around
half a million were made,
around 3% of the total
Beetle output.
Meanwhile, all of this,
the hub of Europe's greatest and
most profitable car-making business,
all of this, it's all here
because of the Beetle.
Epic British fail.
Eventually, unable to offer
the factory as a free gift
if you bought
the Allies gave it back
to the government of Saxony.
Soon, the Beetle was appearing
where it was always meant to -
on the driveways of German families.
Abroad, too, although now,
like many of its contemporaries,
it had a new name -
The Volkswagen,
the people's car.
But here's the real irony -
it's rumoured that when Major Hirst
arrived at Volkswagenwerk,
he found the remains of only
a few Kraft durch Freude Wagen.
And if that's true, I'm forced to
conclude that had the Allied
bombing campaign had been
just a little bit more thorough,
the second half of the 20th century
would have been spared
the shameless re-emergence
of Hitler's flatulent people's car.
And more to the point, we might
have been spared one of the most
annoying counter-cultural
movements in history.
But sadly not.
Listen to what the flower people
say
And that's why I've never
really liked the Beetle.
It's not the car, it's the baggage.
It is, tragically,
impossible to separate
the gormless face of the VW Beetle
from a lot of soppy hippy nonsense.
Quite how the Beetle came to be
the symbol of the flower people
is a mystery,
but it was in blissed-out
California that this
fascist fugitive created
a brand-new, loved-up identity.
Flower people, walk on by
Did none of these people ever stop
to think where this car
had come from?
Nope.
The ex-Nazi party runabout was cool.
And that's all that mattered.
But the Beetle couldn't hide
its KdF past entirely.
The hippies may have been
responsible for many
questionable things
like flower power, Woodstock,
The Incredible String Band, sit-ins,
wigwams, the acceptance of yoghurt
and all the rest of it, but they
were also the innocent victims
of a dubious 1930s German practice
that followed the Beetle around
like a bad smell.
Nudism was something our old mates
from Kraft durch Freude
were very keen on indeed,
although we don't know exactly why.
But it's clear that the Beetle
helped this provocative
pastime spread to
West Coast America.
This is '50s America,
a simpler time, when the height
of family entertainment was
the car door mechanism
of a Chevrolet.
But at around the time the Beetle
scuttled onto Yankee shores
the country became
a free-love infested,
swinging hotbed of carefree
psychedelic exhibitionism.
And, no, I don't know
why she's chasing a heron.
But everywhere one of these vicious
outbreaks of nudity occurred,
you were sure to spot
a lurking Volkswagen.
It even looks a bit like a buttock.
Part of my problem with the Beetle
apart from all the Nazi baggage,
obviously,
is that,
rather like the hippies themselves,
it's a bit falsely humble.
It's perceived as being cute
so it comes across as a sort
of smug, ironic apology
on the part of its owner.
But, actually, it isn't cute
and it definitely isn't ironic.
This shape, the engine,
the chassis -
they were the manifestations
of some very radical engineering
thinking of the 1930s.
But it's that adaptable chassis
that's allowed me to find in
all this a small sunlit upland.
Or, rather, sand dune.
I used to say you weren't
a proper car enthusiast
if you hadn't owned a Mini,
but now I think that's
actually a beach buggy.
This is brilliant, cos it turns
any slightly dreary English seaside
into a bit of California.
And round we go.
Yes, please.
Oh, sorry! I think that might have
been Edinburgh.
The original beach buggy
was built in 1963
by a bloke called Bruce Meyers
and it was actually
a shortened Beetle chassis,
engine, suspension and then
just a bolt-on fibreglass body.
This Beetle-based buggy is the GP2 -
the British version of
Meyer's Californian marvel.
It weighs a mere 600kg.
That means its 1600cc twin port
Beetle engine can kick
a lot of sand in a wimp's face.
Famous beach buggy advocates
include Elvis Presley,
proving it's OK to drive one
even if you're a slightly bloated,
middle-aged family entertainer.
HE LAUGHS
It's absolutely fabulous.
There isn't an easier car
in the world to slide around.
It's weird, isn't it, to think that
what we're talking about here
is Hitler's vision
of a car for his people
that would run on a dead straight
motorway from Berlin to Moscow
and it's ended up amusing
surf Nazis in California.
California uber alles
Thank you, Adolf Hitler!
So, a happy ending worthy of Herbie
himself.
But not quite.
Remember the betrayed
German workers,
the ones who saved up for
all those little green stamps
so they could have a KdF-Wagen?
Well, in the 1960s, after
a great deal of legal wrangling,
Volkswagen eventually agreed
to pay them compensation.
Or at least, they did
if they were West Germans.
If you'd ended up in East Germany,
you were scheisse out of luck.
In 1945, 16 million defeated Germans
staggered from their flattened homes
to find themselves
once again under a dictatorship,
and the communists weren't about
to compensate anyone
for the great Nazi rip-off.
But no matter.
You simply had to save up
for another ten years or so
and you could have one of these.
Now, you don't need me to tell you
that this is a Trabant.
A Trabi.
And, hang on,
some of you are saying,
aren't Trabants supposed to be
light blue?
Yes, a lot of them were,
but it was also available in white
and in this baby diarrhoea brown.
And because this is a deluxe model,
it came in two tone
baby diarrhoea brown.
Now, in recent years,
the Trabant has enjoyed
something of a renaissance
as a fashion accessory.
It's been driven "ironically",
it's been used as a comedy taxi,
it's been used as a state limousine
by a Bulgarian
foreign minister,
and it's formed the basis of
a number of contemporary artworks.
But, please, let's not get
emotional about it,
because I'm here to tell you
that no amount of cheapskate
*** customising
could disguise the basic fact
that the Trabant was a travesty.
Let's be balanced about this.
There were several good things
about the Trabant.
For a start,
it was very light, at 615kg,
and that's always
a good thing in a car.
Makes it lively.
Trabants were also
exceptionally long-lived,
with an average life expectancy of
That's better than a Volvo.
The secret of the Trabant's
immortality
was a material that the communists
were very, very proud of indeed.
If the old Tomorrow's World had been
an East German production,
then, somebody like Kieran
Prendiville would have said,
it looks like glass fibre,
it feels like glass fibre,
but it's made from Duroplast.
Duroplast.
It was a crude mix of waste
cotton scraps and phenol resin
that was shaped in moulds
to give a rust-proof car
that, in theory,
could last for ever.
And that was the problem.
Duroplast was also toxic
if burned and didn't biodegrade.
So, when your Germanic Wundercar
finally gave up the ghost,
you were stuck with its
non-disposable corpse.
Some managed to saw their Trabis up
and find new uses for them,
but the majority would simply
end up as overgrown eyesores
blotting the landscape
like the automotive undead.
Meanwhile, if you were one
of the three million East Germans
who had been fooled by the Trabi's
advertising campaigns,
with its hi-tech, scientific
looking men in white jump suits,
everyday life with the car was
a load of old pants.
It produced just 26 horsepower
and took 21 seconds to reach 60mph,
which, incidentally,
was its official top speed.
Whatever that meant.
It also smells funny.
Terrible, in fact.
It smells like an
old hospital or something.
The culprit is the ancient
that runs on premixed
petrol and oil.
That is roughly what you'd
put in a cheap '70s moped.
If you've ever owned a '70s
two-stroke moped, you will know
that they produce more smoke than a
whole history of papal successions.
The tailpipe emissions of this car
were around 30 times as bad as those
from a '90s Mercedes saloon.
If ever an industrial paradigm
was needed to illustrate
the folly of central planning,
then surely the Trabant is it.
A terrible car made out of old pants
and foisted upon people
who had no real choice.
For the second time in two decades,
the hapless German working
family had been fobbed off
with a duff people's car.
The addition of brown boot carpet
in 1976
was about as interesting as it got.
But it wasn't all bad.
If you were a well-connected
East German
with a devil-may-care
side-parting,
you could afford one of these.
This is a Wartburg and you're right,
it doesn't look at all shabby.
But that wasn't going to last.
This shape was launched in 1956,
but within a decade, it had been
restyled to look like this.
Now known as the model 353.
The same basic car underneath,
but with new and improved, ie,
uglier, Eastern Bloc bodywork.
In its defence, the Wartburg was
fitted with a one-litre engine
with three cylinders, developing
something like 48 horsepower.
Top speed - 80mph.
And it was made from a proper
car-making material - steel.
How about that?
I know it doesn't sound
particularly impressive,
but you have to remember,
East Germany was a country where
a really fabulous Christmas present
was a beige cardigan
MAN SPEAKS GERMAN
.
.
or a deformed cuddly toy.
It's pretty terrible, really.
The engine is still
a two-stroke stinker,
which is why this car
was known as Farty Hans.
Imagine that - the nicest car
you could hope to own is
called Farty Hans.
It's like the new Jaguar being known
as Guffy Nigel.
But the Communist Party bosses
didn't give a toot about that.
With no competition to worry about,
they simply kept churning out
the same model
for over 25 soul-destroying years.
There was no stopping these
Eastern Bloc boys
.
.
except, ironically, with a wall.
Life behind the wall was
supposed to be a Utopian
and classless worker's paradise.
But a class division did exist
and was perfectly exposed
by our two *** cars.
The cheapo Trabant,
the car of the oppressed
versus the faster,
sleeker Wartburg,
the favoured car of the oppressors -
the Volks Police.
The Volks Police Wartburgs
had been slightly breathed upon.
They produced about seven
horsepower more.
The Trabi, meanwhile,
had the advantage of small size.
Keeping a low profile was key
if you wanted to
avoid attention from
the secret division of the Volks
Police, better known as the Stasi.
The Stasi liked to collect files
on its citizens.
They reckon there were so many files
that if you stacked them
all on a shelf, it would be
The Stasi oversaw the most invasive
campaign of psychological
intimidation
ever conducted by a state
on its own citizens.
They would break into people's
houses simply to leave signs
that they had been there,
move the furniture around,
interfere with personal effects.
They used dogs to track people
who they thought would be trying to
escape
and to make sure the dogs
had your scent,
they'd go into your laundry
basket and steal your pants.
They'd then keep these at HQ
in a pickle jar and if you got away,
give the pants to the dog
and then they knew your smell.
Even driving a car made from other
people's pants wouldn't help much,
as the Stasi were
absolutely everywhere.
By the late '80s, there was one
Stasi officer for every 63 citizens,
and that's not even counting
all the informants.
Some people reckoned
it was as high as one in five.
But the East German Government
and the Stasi or the paid informers,
they'd all reckoned without
one thing -
East Germany's humble people's car
would be the means of
symbolic escape.
November 1989, the East Germans
have finally had enough.
It began with confusion
Mass protests erupt in Berlin
and thousands, accompanied by
convoys of smoke-belching Trabis,
flock to the wall demanding to
pass to the West.
Open up, they chanted, open up.
The border guards, demoralized
and overcome by the old hospital
fumes of 100 Trabis,
let them through, convinced that
their first taste of Western culture
would see them streaming right back.
I've been looking for freedom
But it was no good.
Even the Hoff couldn't put them off.
# I've been looking for freedom
Still the search goes on
The Cold War was over.
Sanity had reasserted itself.
The cardboard comrades' car
had led the charge,
and Farty Hans had farted his last.
A people's car indeed.
So, the Trabi - for the first
it simply plodded around East
Germany in a fug of its own making,
helping to cement
the people's misery.
But, really, it was just waiting to
make its one significant journey,
this brief but glorious lunge
for freedom across the bridge here,
after which its usefulness
was completely exhausted.
So, as a symbol of liberty,
which is what a car should be,
it remains very poignant.
But as a car per se,
it is quite literally rubbish.
So far, the people's car has been
a litany of repression and disaster.
But to show that it was possible
to create a small,
affordable four-seater,
we need only come to sunny,
capitalist Italy
and try this.
This is a Fiat Cinquecento,
or Fiat 500 in a less romantic
Germanic language.
It was called the 500 because
it had a 500cc engine.
Although, strictly speaking,
the early cars had a 479cc engine,
but Fiat Quattrocentosettantanove
was going to be a bit of
a flamboyant name,
even for the Italians.
And at the time,
the little Fiat 500 was the height
of zippy carefree Italian cool.
The adverts of the time proudly
showing how you too
could drive like a maniac,
traumatise by-standing cattle,
and store unwanted gas bills,
but, crucially, still have enough
room in the back for your favourite
luxury picnic hamper
or an adulterous weekend getaway
playing doctors and nurses.
In recent years, we've lost sight
of what "small car" really means.
The Fiat 500
is absolutely chuffing piccolo.
It's just 275mm,
or less than your school ruler,
longer than a Smart car,
but this has four seats.
It weighs just 470kg - around
two-thirds of the original Mini.
It really is very, very simple.
The engine is an air-cooled
two-cylinder job,
mounted here in the back,
same as the Beetle's was,
and for similar reasons.
The earliest cars developed
a widow-making 13 horsepower.
But don't worry, because this one
is a bit later and has 17.
Maintenance was intended to be
very simple.
In the more rural areas of Italy,
corner shops would stock
essential Cinquecento spares -
spark plugs, belts,
and what have you.
Rather in the way that these days
you can buy a sat nav
from Sainsbury's.
And we think of it as being
incredibly cute,
but Dante Giacosa did not design
it to be this shape
so that we would go
oochy-coochy-coo,
he did it this way to use as
little sheet metal as possible,
because in 1950s Italy,
steel was expensive.
And that brings us to this
fabric sunroof,
which was not an extravagance,
and it wasn't an option -
you had to have it.
And it was there because fabric
is lighter and cheaper than steel.
Avanti.
The 500 was launched in 1957
with the aim of the being
the Italian people's car.
A four-wheeled version of
a Vespa scooter.
And while the KdF-Wagen
and the Trabi were cheap,
they were, it has to be said,
about as cheerful as your average
Sean Penn film.
The 500was fun.
In the way that the Trabant
reminded you of you
and your ideology's failings,
the Fiat Cinquecento seemed to
confirm that a simple life
could be one of unalloyed joy.
But it's in the narrow, cobbled
streets of the city
that this proto-Smart car
really comes in to its own.
And you can see why.
I mean, this is an ancient city,
this is part of
the Italian renaissance.
Some of the roads are tiny.
But look, here we go, room for two.
The Fiat 500 is a potent
symbol of Italian utilitarian chic,
the Latin driving temperament,
and creative solutions
to everyday parking problems.
Stuck for a space? No matter.
Thanks to the 500, you can squeeze
expertly into any gap
without a care in the world.
Between 1957 and 1975, Fiat built
around 3.
6 million Cinquecenti.
Not bad.
But it isn't Italy's most successful
people's car, not by a long way.
That's coming up now.
Forgive me,
Father, for I have sinned.
CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
Fiat's next bash at a people's car
was launched, literally, in 1966.
Fiat spared no expense
on the 124's arrival.
It even had those white jump-suited
guys from the Trabi ad who
were clearly looking for work.
Despite that, no-one could have
predicted that this
unassuming little car
would go on to be
the vehicle of choice for one
of the greatest tyrannies on Earth.
Cars like this were around
when I was a boy,
and when I was a boy, Italian cars
were famous for two things -
firstly, for dissolving like a
soluble aspirin
as soon as it rained,
secondly, for being great fun
to drive.
Now, the difficulty we had in
finding this mint example suggests,
rather tragically, that the
first of those is perfectly true.
Now let's see about the other one.
Now, this looks a bit like a car
I designed when I was six,
and I'm sure lots of six-year-olds
still design like this -
three basic boxes
with some wheels added.
Indeed, one of Fiat's official
histories describes this as
"a rather conventional car".
But hang on a minute -
beneath this
depiction-of-a-car-on-a-signpost
exterior,
the 124 is a bit more
sofisticato than you might think.
For a start, it came with
a range of typically Italian fizzy
four-pot engines.
This 1968 car has a 1.
2-litre
developing 60 horsepower.
Now that's not a lot, I know,
but what it does have
it gives willingly,
enthusiastically.
Underneath, there were
coil springs,
anti-roll bars and disc brakes.
Now that gave you very good bar room
bragging rights in the 1960s,
especially in a family car.
What basic Italian cars
always gave - still give, in fact -
is the sensation of performance
without the expense
and inconvenience of actually
achieving it.
So you get an exciting engine,
you get a nice gear change,
nicely weighted pedals,
nicely weighted steering
.
.
a car you can
sort of fling around a bit.
The 124 may be as bouncy and fun as
Tigger's honeymoon night,
but there is one area in which
it's sadly lacking - air-con.
It's got nice big glass, it makes
a nice noise, it's happy, it's hot.
I'm sweaty.
I'm literally
the hottest person in the world.
MUFFLED RADIO MESSAGE
Bah!
But what's all this got to do with
the greatest tyranny on Earth?
To explain, I'm having to take
the 124 back home.
I'm now driving up the ramps of
Fiat's historic Lingotto car factory
deep in the heart of Turin.
It opened in 1923 - an Art Deco
masterpiece for manufacturing.
Sadly, now a shopping centre
like so many other of these things,
but one little bit of it, one very
significant bit, survives
pretty much as it was -
the rooftop test track.
What a view!
Much better than our Dunsfold
test track.
On to the banking and whoo-hoo!
HE LAUGHS
Ho-ho!
From up here, Fiat executives could
survey their empire,
which was, let's be frank, Italy,
because Fiat was such an enormous
force in Italian commerce
and politics and culture.
And that empire was about to
grow enormously.
Well, let me rephrase that,
actually.
The Fiat 124's empire
was about to grow enormously.
Over here, we have another one,
apparently identical
apart from the colour.
But, actually, there are something
like 900 subtle changes under
the skin, and one very significant
change on it, which is this
.
.
the badge.
It does not say "Fiat".
It shows the outline
of a historic, fast-sailing boat
from the River Volga, and the
Russian name for one of those is
Lada.
RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS
In the 1960s, the Cold War
was at its most precarious,
but what bothered the Soviet Union
most of all was this -
in the USA, there was one
car for every 2.
7 people,
in the Soviet Union,
one for every 238.
In 1965, Americans produced
Russians produced under 250,000.
Something had to be done.
Now, it might seem odd
that the Soviet Union looked to
outside help in order to bring
cars to its people.
The Soviets were already experts
at producing tractors, trucks
and especially tanks in
truly astonishing numbers,
but they didn't know much
about making
a typical small passenger car.
So if you were lucky enough to
have one,
you were unlucky enough for it to be
something like a Zaporozhet.
So, approaches were made
by the Soviets to the West, even,
ironically, to our old friends
at VW.
Nothing came of that,
which was a lucky escape for Ivan.
There were flirtations with Britain
as well and with France,
but, finally, in 1966,
the Soviet minister of automobile
production signed a deal with
the managing director of Fiat,
that charged Fiat with building
a brand-new factory,
capable of producing 2,000
passenger cars a day,
and the car would be a Sovietised
version of the Fiat 124.
And this is the result -
the AvtoVAZ factory at Tolyatti,
known to everybody else in the world
as the home of Lada,
and it still is.
But why pick Fiat?
Well, the Italian car company
already had a relationship with
the USSR, having supplied trucks to
them in kit form 40 years earlier.
Also, the Fiat 124,
it has been suggested, was the ideal
car for a Communist regime, as it
was predominantly functional and
exhibited little in the way of pesky
bourgeois decadence.
But was there something more
shady at the heart of the deal?
Let's not forget,
there was a Cold War on.
Outside of the actual
Communist nations,
the biggest Communists
of the 1960s were the Italians.
The notorious Red Brigade was born
in the metal pressing shops of Fiat.
It quickly spread to other parts of
the Italian car industry -
the Pirelli tyre factory,
the Magneti Marelli
auto-electrics work.
And by the '70s, over in Italy,
Communist Red Brigade members
with jobs at Fiat were not only
getting funds and support
from the KGB, they were also
murdering their own executives.
jailed for terrorist offences.
There was arson in the factories,
strikes, mass walkouts.
And the Agnelli family,
the effective owners of Fiat,
became the most guarded
family in the world.
Allegedly, Gianni Agnelli carried
a cyanide pill
in case he was kidnapped.
Now as somebody once said, "When
Fiat trembles, Italy trembles.
"
So, was the deal done to keep
the Soviets sweet
in case Communism eventually
triumphed,
or even simply to placate Fiat's
Communist workers even if it didn't?
It's just a thought.
Anyway, in April 1970, the first car
rolled off the glorious
new production line,
just in time for the centenary
of Lenin's birth.
Nice.
And this is what those
first cars looked like.
Yes, exactly like a Fiat 124,
but thanks to the famously sterling
condition of Russian roads,
under the skin, the Lada was given
a Marxist make-over to deal with
these sort of mildly
adverse conditions.
It had an all new engine,
a blistering 1cc bigger than before.
The steel bodywork was thickened
all over.
Over time, a big radiator was added,
the floor was strengthened,
square headlights went on, new
bumpers, different wheels -
this no-nonsense Communist approach
extended to their Finnish
advertising campaign.
ADVERT IN FINNISH
Now here we are in 2013 and I'm
driving something of a rarity.
It's an original stock, low mileage,
under 3,000 Lada Riva.
But that shouldn't be a rarity,
should it?
I mean, few things in life are less
rare than a Lada Riva.
It is in very good condition,
by which
I mean it's in quite poor condition,
because that's how they were made.
This is a 1999 car,
but, even so, you can tell
it's an ancient design,
made with very tired tooling
in a very old factory,
mainly because of the massive gaps
everywhere,
such as these ones on the radiator,
round the lights,
down the edge of the bonnet.
It has plain pressed steel
wheels in 1999!
Look at this gap here on the door -
a cat could escape through that.
And let's remember that this car is
a very low mileage example,
it's never been touched or repaired
or anything like that,
so you can only assume that this
orange peel effect on the paint
and this nasty run down here -
well, that's how it came
out of the factory.
I don't think Honda were having
any emergency board meetings,
let's put it that way.
That said, a lot of developing
countries around the world
were very keen on it
and so Russia began
licensing and exporting Ladas to a
whole slew of Third World countries,
including India, Egypt,
and Thatcher's Britain.
Strangely enough, in Britain, this
car, the Riva, enjoyed a brief
renaissance as the car of the
oppressed and immobile people,
because in the Thatcher era,
the industrial North
and parts of the Midlands
were wracked by redundancies
and people were very hard up.
This was the cheapest car
you could buy.
This was the easiest way
to stay mobile.
And briefly, this was the tenth
bestselling car in Britain.
Some people risk buying a used car
when they could quite easily afford
a brand-new Lada.
The UK Lada ads were a cornucopia
of extravagance
compared with what had come before.
You either had the luxury
of Cannon and Ball
I thought you said "risque", Tommy,
I thought you said "risque.
"
.
.
or this action-packed spectacular,
which presented the Lada as some
kind of gravity-defying super car,
perfect for a typical Sunday
afternoon's African safari
Each Lada is built to survive
.
.
while you listen to your mix
tape of the Airwolf theme song.
AIRWOLF THEME SONG PLAYS
.
.
the roughest of roads.
So, in order to test that claim,
I've come here -
the old ZiL automobile factory
.
.
275 hectares of industrial complex
right in the centre of Moscow
.
.
now all but abandoned.
Interestingly, they used to make
those old pre-Lada Fiat kit trucks
here.
It's now home to the odd
rabid stray dog
and the most distressed surfaces
this side of Jeremy Clarkson's face.
Sorry about the weaving around -
there are some quite big
holes in this bit of road.
Ow!
Good God!
Hole!
TYRES SCREECH
I can see some very concerned
faces in my rear-view mirror.
OVER RADIO: 'Sorry, James.
'I'll be with you in a moment.
'
'We'd barely started and the
ancient Communist potholes have
'given our decadent Western crew
car a flat tyre.
'This is a top of the line,
modern day Range Rover.
'I think that's one-nil to the
'70s levitating safari wagon.
'
LADA BEEPS HORN
So, while the beefed up Soviet Lada
could handle anything that could be
thrown at it, the same couldn't be
said for the Soviet regime.
By the 1980s, everything was
falling apart.
The great social experiment had
yielded a result which was,
"No, it doesn't really work.
Sorry.
"
So, a lot of people did what any
reasonable person would do
under the circumstances
.
.
they got drunk.
RUSSIAN FOLK SONG PLAYS
Even the President decided to put
the "pub" back into Soviet Republic.
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
Back at the Togliatti factory,
things weren't any better.
They actually changed the speed of
the production line
throughout the day.
It could go a bit
faster in the afternoon
TYRES RUMBLE
.
.
because everyone's
hangover had worn off a bit.
There was widespread theft -
components were being
catapulted over the perimeter fence
of the factory by groups of workers
building cars and supplying
spares on the black market.
Pirelli Tyres brought in for the
export models -
they were stolen
from the factory
because obviously
the Russians would want them.
Their tyres were terrible.
And they were taken
out of the factory on an elaborate
rubber boat that left via the sewers
and then sailed off
down the River Volga,
rather like the fast pirate boat
the car was named after
in the first place -
an irony the Russians would have
surely appreciated,
were they not completely Sputnik-ed.
Lada was falling apart.
Your Lada Riva was falling apart.
If you were lucky enough to
have a Lada Riva, it was being
gradually reduced by rust,
by the potholes
LADA THUDS
.
.
like that, and by your neighbours
nicking vital parts
during the night.
Spares were very, very scarce
and very, very expensive.
Fortunately, enterprising Soviets
would set up
guerrilla roadside repair stations
with ingenious DIY solutions.
Leaky radiator, comrade?
The answer is
.
.
Russian mustard powder.
You pour a bit of that in,
forms a very, very effective seal.
Another common problem
was that the bottom of the fuel tank
would be holed on the rough
roads.
Well, the answer to that was
a bar of Soviet soap.
You rub that against the hole,
it forms a small plug,
which becomes rock hard -
very effective.
What else have we got?
Oh, yes,
here's a very good story we heard.
There was a man,
an old man we've been talking to,
driving in a very remote area
and the return spring
on his clutch pedal failed.
Not to worry, though,
because he had at his disposal
what the Soviets refer to simply as
"rubber product number two" -
here's a copy of the packaging.
You can probably guess what it is
from the picture of the smoking
factory at the top.
It's a ***.
"Rubber product number one"
was a gas mask.
And to pay for this DIY MOT,
all you needed were some luxury
Western goods to trade.
Have a fish, mate.
It was the comradeship of the road.
And so, like a cockroach after
a nuclear blast, the Lada just
kept going as society
crumbled around it.
As the Soviets kept on churning them
out, Lada gained
a reputation, not as a maker of
people's cars, or even
a robust survivor, but as a long
obsolete fossil -
a global punch line.
There are more specific Lada jokes,
I think,
than there are about any other car.
What do you call
a Lada at the top of a hill?
A miracle.
A Lada with the window
open is a bottle bank.
A man buys a Lada
and takes it back to the dealership.
"This car is useless," he says.
"It'll only get to 75 up that hill.
"
"Well, that's not bad,"
says the dealer.
"It's useless," says the man,
"I live at number 93.
"
A man goes to a scrap yard.
"Have you got a hub cap for a Lada?"
he asks.
"Yes," says the scrap merchant,
"that sounds like a fair swap.
"
Ho-ho-ho.
Laugh, possibly,
but like the Beetle before it,
the Lada was a survivor.
I have here an extract
from an article that
appeared in Financial Times
in 1967
talking all about
the Fiat/Soviet deal.
And it says, "Soviet planners have
made it clear they do not intend
"to emulate Detroit's practice
of planned obsolescence,
"and so the Soviet versions
of the Fiat 124 may well
"continue in production
until the late 1970s.
"
Well, I bet he wishes he'd been
better informed,
because the last one rolled out of
this factory in 2012.
This, then, will be
the legacy of the Lada -
not that it was one of the oldest
cars still being produced,
nor that it was one
of the few survivors
of the collapsed Communist regime.
No, the Lada will for ever be
remembered as the worldwide
punch line of
Christmas-cracker-level comedy crap.
It does distress me that a story
that begins with the gorgeous,
almost feminine, Fiat 124, is going
to end with the world's
most derided car -
a car with a face
that only a Russian's shot-putter's
mother could love.
It's going to go out with
a pathetic whimper.
The poor old Lada -
yet another victim of state tyranny.
There's always an issue with
a dictator's car.
The Beetle -
it was brilliant,
but the people who paid for it
never actually took delivery.
The Trabi and the Wartburg -
they were awful,
but the people were forced
to have them.
The Lada -
it started off quite well, but
totalitarianism slowly ruined it.
It does seem that if you actually
want to mess up your motoring,
you need a dictator.
But let's not forget the Lada's
long journey began in a joyful
flourish of Italian style.
It fell from the sun-drenched sky.
We thought it should bow out
the same way.
RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS
It's what the designer,
Oscar Montabone, would have wanted.
The Lada - hated by purists, mocked
by the people, and disowned by Fiat.
But there's a twist -
I wonder if the people signing
that original deal
realised it would go on for so long
and I wonder if Fiat's executives
ever imagined this.
Now, no-one knows for sure quite
how many 124-derived cars have
been built, but if we combine
Fiat's original output with
the Togliatti cars and all the ones
built in India, Spain, Bulgaria,
Turkey, Egypt and Korea, it comes
to something like 20 million,
which means that the largely
forgotten Fiat 124 is,
in fact, the second
bestselling car in history.
MUSIC PLAYS: "Brindisi"
from La Traviata