Sat 08 July 2017
By Adrian
In Rants .
People are hypocrites. They tend to forget the bad things of the past and then they idealize the past as a time when everything was all sunshine and rainbows. Happens to me, also.
Did you notice on social media, at least in my country, how people now admire the cars built back in the Iron Curtain days? In Romania there was the Dacia car, built under Renault 12 license. Sure, when it first appeared it was a modern, pretty reliable car and people loved it. As time went by, it became a nightmare for most owners. Almost everyone back then looked at the Western cars, which were continually developing and improving while Dacia was only getting facelifts. The general body line stayed the same from the early 70s to the early 2000s. The engines and drivetrain only got minor modifications. While the electronic fuel injection was gaining more and more advantages compared to the carburetor, Dacia only got a EFI system well past the mid 90s. Somehow it was expected that due to the isolation of communist Romania such things would happen.
A symbol of a past, communist era, it began to be sought after by car enthusiasts, which is a good thing. Not only Dacia, but also other Romanian car brands began to become collectibles:
ARO, which had a good reputation back in the 70s but generally faded away with time, because just like Dacia, all that was getting was facelifts while engines, suspensions and drivetrain in general remained the same.
The SR line of trucks with V8 engines that gulped gasoline like crazy and got diesels after the oil crisis in the 70s have now been idealized as the motor of the Romanian socialist economy. Yes, for those times they were pretty good and reliable.
The Roman line of trucks, licensed from Saviem, Raba and MAN, and were produced for decades with only facelifts and only got very little improvements, lacking performances, as opposed to their Western rivals. Although very hard to drive and maintain, people forget that and only remember that these trucks have "built Romania" and try to persuade themselves and others that they are as good as modern trucks today. Sorry, but that's just lies and deceit.
The military DAC trucks, which had good performances but again, remained at the same level for decades, only to be surpassed by other brands in terms of performance.
Small vans and buses, although rare, have been saved to become collectibles. Some were pretty good for their time but with little to no improvements in performance and comfort they slowly became obsolete and ignored. With no air conditioning, power steering and poor fuel economy, some people still deceive themselves that those relics are better than their modern counterparts.
In the end, the past is the past. It cannot be relived, it cannot be revived, and tends to deceive us by showing only its better parts. But that's only a trick of the mind. Today is here, tomorrow will take its place and today will become yesterday with all its good and bad memories, from which we'll remember only the positive parts, unknowingly or not.