Like Sore Thumbs

Cross the river from Warsaw's Royal Palace, and you get to Praga Polnoc. Yes, there is a place called Prague, in Warsaw, because Poland is better than the Czech Republic. Apparently. The Polnoc bit means either North, or Midnight, depending on which you prefer. Such are the vagaries of the Polish language.

Praga does not have the best reputation of Warsaw's districts, unless you find stab wounds a fashion accessory, in which case Praga Midnight is the coolest place in town. The area has never really considered itself a true part of Warsaw though, instead being the murky cousin who lives on the Eastern bank; home to Communist sympathisers, workshy benefit scroungers and bears. Not the vodka-swilling fur hatted Russians, but the grizzly type, who live in a specially designed concrete run next to one of the busiest junctions in Warsaw.

With assualts, pollution and carnivores to contend with, one should enter Praga with caution. Most people opt for either a stout sturdy stick as a deterrent, or one of the 50ml bottles (two shots) of vodka that can be bought locally for a pound. Or, as someone else has done, arrive in a canary yellow Volvo 240.

Volvos are one of the most unthreatening manufacturers in the world. Attributed to antiques traders and librarians, the simple reliable oblongs have been shuttling Swedes in and out of forests for decades, cocooning their owners from such risks as avalanches, black ice and elk. There's no Saab-style aggressiveness of snarling raked grills, just an unimposing functional block that can be relied on and ignored, like an Ikea coffee table. Wrapping the whole thing up in that shade of paint also makes it look like a cubist banana.

The 240 was one denomination of the entire 200-series range of cars which lasted from 1974 to 1993; a production run so succesful that it outlasted the model designed to replace it (the 700-series.) And despite only a third production run being estates, the blocky 200-series became the modern icon of a Volvo - square, sturdy and safe. So what formed the basis of that reputation? The Volvo Experimental Safety Car.

A test bed for the technologies that would morph the old 140 into the 200-series, the VESC incorporated all-important features like crumple zones, self-collapsing engine mounts and four-wheel disc brakes, but with the practical application of using those then-expensive systems onto a mass-production affordable motor. And over the course of the 2.8million production run, more and more features would be added to keep the Swedes safe. A truss bar ran across the top of the B pillar, to stop the roof deflecting more than 75mm in the even of a rollover. All doors contained tubular steel side-impact bars. The fuel system must be fully intact in the event of any collision, and all sharp edges must be rounded off. Like the church of St Cyril that stands behind it, this 240 was a monument to sanctuary - hewn from stone but shelter from the storm.

Of course, moving a cathedral is an equally monumental effort to building one, and the 2.0litre pushrod engine in this number, despite pushing out 124bhp, would be a rather thirsty number. Which is why you should look closer at the pictures. Spot it?

Twin petrol filler flaps. Poland has the highest number of LPG-converted cars, and this guzzler is no exception. Which is hardly surprisng, considering the drinking problems of the locals, bears included.

Poland has an odd affinity for Fiats. The Communists struck up a fair few deals with the Italians post-war to build the 125 saloon and 126 city-car, and prior to that had built the Fiat 508 under licence in 1932. It still continues to make the modern Fiat 500 in the old FSM factory down in Bielsko-Biala.

And these cars have a certain pride of place for the Polish driver. The FSO models Warszawa and Syrena may be 'proper' Polish cars, but it was the ubiquitous nature of the 125p and 126p (that "p" is important) that endears them to the heart of most. Your father, or his father, had one, or you had one at university, and have fond memories of rebuilding the engine at the side of the road, or of near-accidents, or of having the windscreen wipers stolen. Despite being Italian, the Polski Fiats were as Polish as shipyard strikes.

In the homeland of the 125, however, they weren't that gratefully received. The Italians considered them as little more than a stopgap between the rapidly aging Fiat 1500, and this, the Fiat 132. It was supposed to be the flagship model, encorporating all the wonderful features of Fiat's sports heritage in a 4-door saloon that can carry the wife, kids and the weekly shop. Some sort of representative of Fiats as a whole - stylish yet lightweight, practical but cheeky with it. In the Fiat 132 though, that just isn't there.

Putting the 132 alongside the model it was intended to replace, it's not too easy to see the differences. Sure, the rake of the nose is sharper, lending a BMW E21-style aggressiveness to the image, but this is subsequently stolen by the almost fairy-light size of the headlamps, which were blanked altogether in 1981 into faceless square units. A range of sporty wheels may help visually, but those wheels were steel heavy pressed steel, maintaining the large unsprung weight of the car and not doing the standard three-box saloon any favours in terms of handling. In fact, considering all the promises made with the Fiat 125, the 132 comes across as a bit of a let-down.

The beauty of the 132, then, must be more than skin-deep. Put aside your dislike for harsh square lines for a moment, and take a look at the mechanical aspects, and you'll start to get more of a feeling as to what Fiat intended with this model. Engine-wise, twin cams came as standard, starting off with the 98hp 1.6 as the base model (the one in this particular car) all the way up to a 2.0 injected monster with 122 on tap, pumping out to the same live axle rear drive that the 125 had. Combined with safety features like impact-collapsable steering columns, for Fiat it seemed like a step in the right direction. For Poles, though, who already had things like four-wheel disc brakes, the 132 was a step backwards, and for overseas buyers who had the option of the Ford Cortina/Taunus or other, cheaper, Japanese equivalents, the Fiat was never going to be a serious competitor.

It's not exactly easy to enthuse over the 132 - it certainly doesn't hold a place in the heart of the average Pole as much as the 125p did. But then again, it was the first Fiat partially assembled by robots, so one can forgive its lack of emotion. So where did they go so wrong? What is it that the 125p had in spades that the 132 lacked so much? Maybe it's that one word that pops into your head when you talk about Italian cars: passion. The 125, somehow, had it. The 508 had it. Even the new 500 has it, but the 132 didn't, and without that little spark, what sort of foreign romance would it be?

1988 was a happy year for some. For the Soviet Union, the mighty Buran shuttle was launched, Estonia declared itself a sovereign state of its own, and Mikhail Gorbachev's economic restructuring, known as Perestroika, began.

For the sturdy eastern republic of Ukraine, all three of these were significant. Ukraine at that point was a significant industrial powerhouse for the Soviet Union, having constructed not only the magnificent Buran shuttle itself (twice the size of America's shuttles) but also the Antonov-225, the shuttle carrier and world's largest aircraft. It was also home to a significant number of the Soviet's vehicle manufacturers - KrAZ, LAZ, LuAZ and ZAZ, and was rightfully considered a Rather Important Area. It also had some making up to do over the rather embarrasing Chernobyl incident.

All that productivity would see its end with Perestroika. No more Five Year Plans, no more planned economies; things would come down to an almost-Western supply and demand style economy, where factories only produce what the market can afford to buy. And there wasn't exactly a huge demand for space shuttles, or 600-tonne-capacity planes in the domestic market. As cool as it would be to go to the local cabbage shop in a six-turbined Antonov, what people really wanted was cheap, economic, reliable transport and the available model, the air-cooled rear-engined ZAZ-965, was by then a shuddering monstrosity of '50s technology in a 70's shell. ZAZ needed something modern, new, technologically comparible to the market economies it would be competing with, if it had any hope of weathering the economical reforms.

By "modern" of course I mean "what Ford did with the Fiesta ten years previously." Enter the ZAZ 1102 Tavria, a wedgy little box with a 1.1 litre engine, squirting out 51hp was competitive with its micro-class companions like the Talbot Sunbeam or Lada Samara; the little ZAZ had McPherson Struts and a five-speed gearbox, technical revolutions for a country like the Ukraine. In its defense, it was planned at the end of the 1970s, but deemed at that point "unnecessary" for the grand old USSR, and temporarily shelved. The financial demands of Perestroika, however, brought it back off the shelves and into the factories, where it was churned out alongside the old ZAZ-968 until that model was retired in 1994.

Of course, with Estonia getting riled about its status in 1988, and the other satellite countries in the Union grumbling, it wouldn't be long before the Soviet Union collapse would shake Ukraine's economic might to its foundations, and despite its productivity, ZAZ wouldn't escape the fallout; with its protecting overlords running for the hills, the company had little room to manouvre in terms of development. The little ZAZ Tavria therefore remained in production for the next twenty years, spawning a booted version (the Slawuta), an estate (the Dana) and even high-body Courier-style vans and pickups.

There's no surprise this little model has ended up in Warsaw - being only 200km from the border, the economical little runaround would have no qualms bouncing its way through the crumbling heartland of post-Soviet Poland. Even less so when you consider it stands only 5km away from the FSO factory, owned 20% by parent company UkrAVTO... who coincidentally own ZAZ too.