Budget/Eastern Bloc 80s cars

[BigMon]

Kuwahara said:

Dapster said:

Can we have an honorable mention of the Daewoo? Tired re-heated GM cars from a decade earlier, cheap plastics and zero image. Plus the added spice of colossal corporate failure into the mix - chairman of the board fled to Vietnam before being brought back to South Korea, tried and jailed for masterminding $44bn of accounting fraud (I think he was accused of trousering $2bn of it himself), before the whole ship went down.

I’m sure Halfords were the dealers for those.

I worked for EDS Defence when these were reasonably popular and, for some reason, a lot of the ex-forces guys I worked with bought them mainly (as far as I could tell) because they came with three years breakdown cover or something.

I could never see the appeal of a rebadged old Vauxhall tbh.

[gt40steve]

BigMon said:

Kuwahara said:

Dapster said:

Can we have an honorable mention of the Daewoo? Tired re-heated GM cars from a decade earlier, cheap plastics and zero image. Plus the added spice of colossal corporate failure into the mix - chairman of the board fled to Vietnam before being brought back to South Korea, tried and jailed for masterminding $44bn of accounting fraud (I think he was accused of trousering $2bn of it himself), before the whole ship went down.

I’m sure Halfords were the dealers for those.

I worked for EDS Defence when these were reasonably popular and, for some reason, a lot of the ex-forces guys I worked with bought them mainly (as far as I could tell) because they came with three years breakdown cover or something.

I could never see the appeal of a rebadged old Vauxhall tbh.

Halfords service centres did warranty work and servicing. Some branches had a Daewoo representative & cars available to road test. In addition to the few actual
Daewoo Centres , the deal with Halfords gave them nationwide coverage.

The cars were fixed price, no haggling. The business model went far beyond breakdown cover. They had a warranty that included wear & tear. At service if a car needed tyres, brake pads etc they would be fitted at no cost to the customer. So they had an appeal to a certain customer base.

[Lotusgone]

My uncle Jim was utterly uninterested in cars and his buying strategy was, it seemed, maximum value for money (in his eyes).

He had a Wartburg, then a Moskvich. The eastern European options became unsatisfactory and he bought the most basic level Cortina estate which, IIRC, had matt black bumpers.