>I wish we could get these in the US. We lack basic cars anymore.
In the EU, if you want a basic no thrills car, there's the Dacia (Oh no! ... anyway) brand which is basically older, tried and tested, Renault-Nissan group parts put in a budget yet attractive shell, built in Romania.
IIRC they're now the second best selling brand in the EU.
The exact same cars are being sold under either Renault or Nissan badges in different parts of the world.
There was also the Russian Lada Niva Taiga which was very popular here for those living in the mountainous countryside. Very basic and sturdy with almost no electronics at all. Not sure how the situation is now with the war and the sanctions.
I did the Amsterdam-Dakar banger challenge a few years ago. The story was that a Lada Niva has never made it to the finish line :-). Oh and Landrovers you could track by the oil they were leaking.
The Lada Niva was popular because it was one of the very few socialist block cars that could officially go proper off-road, in other words, people had no choice (welcome to the wonderful world of socialism!).
But it was - and still is, can't believe they still make it - a _terrible_ car by any standard, and I can't really understand anyone buying one today. They are not cheap, have terrible design, terrible build quality, terrible fuel consumption, they are loud, and break easily - and they are not THAT good off-road ironically. If you want to put them somewhere on a map, they are about as bad as 70s British cars were.
In the EU, if you want a basic no thrills car, there's the Dacia (Oh no! ... anyway) brand which is basically older, tried and tested, Renault-Nissan group parts put in a budget yet attractive shell, built in Romania.
IIRC they're now the second best selling brand in the EU.
The exact same cars are being sold under either Renault or Nissan badges in different parts of the world.
There was also the Russian Lada Niva Taiga which was very popular here for those living in the mountainous countryside. Very basic and sturdy with almost no electronics at all. Not sure how the situation is now with the war and the sanctions.