h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Has anyone out there ever owned a Lada car ?? I had one for several years, and I have to admit that it was both the most reliable and worst designed cars I have ever had. It was reliable in as much as it would always start, and would always run despite no maitenance and various bits falling off. It never got any maitenance because any minor activity, such as checking the oil, changing the plugs etc. usually involved removing major parts of the engine to get at various screws etc. It also had a vast range of "nice" features e.g. headlights adjustable from the inside etc. none of which worked and most of which had bits broken. If fact we have a saying in our house when we come accross any badly designed object "it must have been designed by the Lada design team".

Sounds like the Jaguar my boss had... except that the Jaguar never runs. It was always in the shop. I drove it a few times, and even changed the radiator fluid in it once and checked the oil for her a few times. Everything electrical was broken... from the digital speedometer, to the cassette deck, to the dumb little analog clock. That clock would have cost her over $1000 to replace.

The engine was a nightmare. It was sluggish in the extreme at acceleration. The postive-ground electrical system was obviously to blame for the rampant electrical faults. The engine was arranged pretty much like you describe... impossible to get at anything easily.

I wonder if things are better now that Jaguar is owned by an American company... after all, it is the one known as "Fix Or Repair Daily."

Maybe Lada was an entreprenurial venture of Jaguar, Inc?

The Lada Niva 4wd is/was a great design as it was merely a slightly scaled down Landrover. The only problem was that the A/C was an afterthought and was slung in the passanger footwell so adults got really cold knees while everyone else got roasted.

And as with the Landy, to check the oil you lean fullstretch across the bonnet if you are less than sx foot tall. This effectively covers whatever you're wearing in dust and oil. Solution - employ a driver. We may be the only family in history with a chauffeur-driven Niva

We had a Lada. An old Lada. We paid £100 for it. It was my wife's car. It was covered in rust. The steering lock was broken, and my wife only locked it when she'd left her coat in it, so anybody could get in and drive it away. Nobody ever did. It was heavy to drive, sluggish and not very economical. It was ugly and horrible, and all my friends teased me about it. I neglected it heroically. We give all our cars names. This one was called 'the shed'.

But it never failed to start, and it never failed to get my wife wherever she wanted to go. It never let us down at all. And when we sold it, 18 months later, it had not needed any repairs other than to replace the worn out brakes. We got £70 for it. So it cost us £30 plus petrol, tax, insurance and a set of brake shoes for 18 months of totally reliable motoring. I still hated it, though.

I had the exact same experience with an old shape (1980) Renault 5. It had an engine from a childs toy train, rolled about like a fish and was hideously ugly - but it ran for 18 months without anything major going wrong, cost about £400 to buy and we sold itr for £250 and all this despite the fact that my brother drove it for 8 months without any engine oil in it.

We sold our Lada Niva for the same price we paid for it after 3 years of driving round Cameroon - 3 million CFA. Reliant Robins probably are reliable too. It all depands on whether you can put up with cringeing every time you get into the car or if you prefer to have a beautiful object that spends more time off road than on

There were the times when Lada was almost the best car here. Now the choice is wider but I have to admit that Ladas are not the worst ones.