That was fun to read. Especially as a 'unfortunate' owner of several Ladas (Zhigulis to be precise).

It wasn't so easy servicable, 23 miles per gallon can be achieved only with best petrol (good luck finding that in USSR) and overall quality was suffering from a number of things: quality of spare parts, drunkennes of conveyor worker, altering of main design to make it cheaper...

And besides, _soviets_ per se wasn't ahead of time, since Lada/Zhiguli was produced on Italian factory bought completely from FIAT.

So if you want to praise engineers - praise Italians first.