One of the things I never fail to find entertaining about cars is the mythology that can spring up around them over time. Famous owners, mysteriously missing vehicles, cars buried in the back garden, there’s a long list of myths and legends that have developed over the roughly century and a half since we removed the horse as the primary propulsion method for people and goods. As something of a hopeless lover of the more casual side of Italian cars, I’ve encountered one myth in particular over and over through the years.
Back in the fall of 2012, I purchased my first Fiat 500, barely a year after the brand returned to the US after bowing out in 1983. While I was initially just trying to get a car that I could easily park on tight city streets, I quickly found myself adapting to the role of “brand ambassador;” answering questions, letting curious folks poke their head in as I loaded groceries in the back, or even talking to other drivers as I waited at stoplights. It was far more attention than I was used to getting, as I’d previously been in an eight-year-old, white BMW 325i that felt like the vehicular incarnation of a basic Men’s Wearhouse business suit. It wasn’t long until I started hearing “Fix It Again Tony,” which I’d somehow known about since childhood, even though I wasn’t a car kid, but also another repetitive line; “back in the day, they rusted away because they were made with Russian steel.”
As the owner of a modern Fiat, I thought nothing of this. My car was built in Toluca, Mexico; it obviously didn’t have any Russian parts, and it was nearly brand new, yet I heard it over and over from guys who I just assumed were parroting whatever nonsense their dad told them back in the day. It wasn’t until I started dabbling in vintage Italian cars that I realized just how deeply canonical this was in the overall car culture. And yet, nobody ever seemed to have any story to tell beyond this. It was this weird dead-end of a statement that I learned to just smile and nod through, because just as they didn’t seem to have anything to go with it, I didn’t really have any rebuttal besides “well, everything rusted back then.”
Where Did This Myth Even Come From?
Fresh off my adventure in exploring the more unusual end of Fiat history and riding high on the rush I always get from obscure research, I decided to chase the rabbit hole of Soviet steel. Initially, I reached out to a few people I knew had been in the Italian car game for longer than I have to see where they first heard the story. While I’m approaching my thirteenth Fiat-iversary, I still consider myself a novice compared to many in the community. There were nearly as many stories as people I asked, ranging from leftover feelings about the poor quality of Italian tanks in World War 2 to a government-forced buyback of prematurely rusting cars, a couple answers of not having any backstory just like how I’d learned it, and one person who said he’d never heard the myth, which I’m not entirely sure I believe.
The one story that eventually stuck out, with a grand total of three answers, was “it goes back to Fiat building a plant in Russia.” One friend who was formerly a service manager for a Fiat dealer in the early ’80s even recalled corporate higher-ups trying to dispel this rumor while he was still working there.
Here was a story that made a good bit of sense on the surface: Fiat struck a deal with the Soviet Union to build an assembly plant in Tolyatti, (sometimes spelled Togliatti or Togliattigrad) so the Russians could build a localized version of the Fiat 124, aka the Lada. As the Soviet Ruble wasn’t exactly the best currency internationally, they agreed to partially pay for this by trading steel back to Fiat. This steel may have been melted down tanks, scrapped ships, or just generally poor quality. Fiat then built their cars in the 70s and 80s using this metal and thus they dissolved like a sugar cube in a hurricane. This made a fair bit of sense as Fiat was not the only western company I’d heard of managing to do business inside the Soviet Union. For one, Pepsi was known to be exchanging their product for Stolichnaya vodka in the early ’70s. Towards the fall of the Soviet Union, they took obsolete warships as payment, including the legendary seventeen submarines, which supposedly gave Pepsi one of the largest navies in the world for a brief moment. In the late ’80s, my own mother worked for Spectrum HoloByte, the video game company that published the first version of Tetris outside of the USSR. But could any of this actually be proven in the case of Fiat?
Is It Even True? The CIA Might Know
Finding documentation from Fiat itself would be difficult at best. First of all, I don’t live in Turin, I can’t just turn up and ask to rummage through old paperwork. Second, Fiat doesn’t really keep records quite like some other car companies. For example, when I had my 1982 Corvette, I was able to easily order photocopies of the build sheet and Monroney sticker from the National Corvette Museum. When I was importing my Fiat Marea, we found it had no build date documentation, so I went with the date of first registration in the UK for the import paperwork. The likelihood of steel purchase records still existing from fifty years ago is extremely slim.
What did Fiat have that would be tracked closely by an outside source? Who closely tracked the ongoing developments of such things? Well, Fiat had communists, and they were making deals in a communist country. Few organizations tracked communists quite like the Central Intelligence Agency. Sure enough, the CIA had their eyes on Fiat and the local Torinese communists, just like they had been watching the developments in Russia. On top of that, it turns out that Fiat wanted to purchase tooling for this new Tolyatti plant from American companies, which required congressional approval for a loan.
Follow the money and follow the communists, at the intersection of the two, there you shall find paperwork. Simply searching “Fiat” in the CIA online reading room returned over 100 declassified documents and news articles that had been clipped from papers and scanned in. Records of Gianni Agnelli attending a glamorous party in New York City. A list of known communists and sympathizers that the CIA had advised Fiat to suspend from a de Havilland Vampire airplane project in 1951. Even a transcript of a “remote viewing session” from Project Star Gate. If you had what was probably a white Fiat 132 on Milan plates with damage to the rear left at a farm near some mountains in the winter of 1982, the CIA would like to have a word with you.
Woven in among all the silly stuff was document after document covering various aspects of the “Fiat Deal.”
The Soviets And Fiat Did, Indeed, Make A Deal
Where to start? It all goes back to the Soviet Five-Year Plan for 1966-1970, when the Soviet Union decided to set the goal of producing at least 700,000 passenger cars by 1970, with 600,000 of these to be built in a single factory. In 1965, they produced a mere 201,000 vehicles, just 4,000 cars per million people. Most of these were for “official use,” and approximately one-fifth were out of service at any given time while awaiting repairs. At this time, there were only 19 repair shops and 105 gas stations in all of Moscow, a city of over 7 million people.
This was quite a change as previously both Stalin and Kruschev had wilfully neglected the automobile industry, with Kruschev in particular calling it a “weakness of capitalism.” According to a CIA report entitled “The Fiat-Soviet Auto Plant and Communist Economic Reforms,” they instead focused on developing rail for transportation across the vast expanses of wilderness, and an assortment of buses, trams, taxis, and even car rentals for local transportation. However, this system was a bit of a failure, and coupled with the need to absorb the excess purchasing power of “everyday” comrades, i.e. bureaucrats and the aspirational upper middle class, building more private automobiles would be needed. Fiat had already been discussing building trucks and tractors within the Soviet Union since 1962, so it was natural to turn to them. In his book “Cars For Comrades,” Lewis Siegelbaum walks us through the history of Tolyatti.
Over a thousand buildings and the residents of the town of Stavropol had recently been moved to make way for the creation of the “Zhiguli Sea,” and the newly moved town was renamed for Italy’s longest serving secretary of their Communist party, Palmiro Togliatti, who had been helping with the negotiations up until his death in 1964. It wasn’t uncommon at the time for new towns and cities to be named for foreign communist leaders, as it was a way of showing that party ideology was spreading outside of the country.
Officially, a competition to be home to the new plant was opened to over 100 cities, but a combination of convenient location, transport links, and plentiful local labor allowed Tolyatti to become the home of AvtoVAZ, soon to become Russia’s equivalent of Detroit or Turin.
The same CIA report notes the Russians knew building a massive auto plant from scratch was outside of the scope of local abilities, so Fiat would be in charge of essentially everything, but Fiat also knew that the Russians could not produce the quality of equipment needed. Fiat plants were already full of American-made tooling, and they wanted to buy approximately $50 million dollars (nearly $500 million in 2025 dollars) worth of foundry equipment and machines for the production of engines, bodies, and other assorted parts. To do this, Fiat had to explain to the US Export-Import Bank (commonly called EXIM Bank) that none of this could be used by the Russians for military purposes and gently work a deal to get loans for the equipment paid to the Italian IMI Bank so there was no direct business between Americans and Russians.
All of this financial ballet was subject to debate in Congress, which ended up in several newspapers, including the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. This is likely how the American public became aware of Fiat making very large deals with “the enemy” in the Cold War.
For their part, American tool manufacturers were generally pretty open to the deal. In “Cars For Comrades” Irving Peachey of Gleason Works says: “ this is just a pure business deal as far as we’re concerned. We have competitors overseas, if we don’t supply the Russians, they will.” The idea of American companies selling their products to the Russians in a roundabout way not only seemed like a good way to make a bit of money in an untapped market, but also a way to potentially inject a taste of capitalism into a planned economy. After all, if an American machine tool manufacturer could get their products into Russia through Fiat, what was to stop other companies from using the same technique in ways fitting for their industry?
According to a CIA intelligence memorandum from July 1972, the deal between Fiat and the Russians was structured to have an unusually low interest rate of 5.6%. The Russians managed to score this because Fiat wasn’t the only company they were flirting with. On the side, they had been chatting with Renault about getting assistance to upgrade the Moskvitch factory, and they made sure Fiat knew this. Thus, Fiat agreed to uncommonly favorable terms on an eleven-year initial deal. Overall, building the factory went pretty smooth, or about as smooth as it was possible to go in 1960s Russia, with the first car rolling off the line only six months late. The main factory may have gone up quickly, but the foundry to cast the needed parts lagged behind, only becoming operational by 1971, but was limited by casting boxes ordered from Poland that hadn’t been delivered. AvtoVAZ struggled to make enough parts for their own cars, let alone have the capacity to help Fiat with anything..
“Cars for Comrades” again paints an interesting portrait of life in Tolyatti as an early AvtoVAZ worker. They needed an immense workforce of 130,000 people, and while the local area had more workers available than most, there was still a shortage, and worse, a shortage of homes for the workers. The entire town was planned with living spaces of about 8-9 square meters per person. Most of the workers were quite young, with an average age of just twenty-six, which meant workers rapidly started families, causing a severe shortage of daycare and school services. These apartments were owned by AvtoVAZ, so any difficulties at work could threaten one’s ability to have a home, but any issues at home would also be dealt with by the company. However, because the factory needed so many workers, punishments for misdeeds were typically light and because city life was so desirable compared to the agricultural communes, scams and sham marriages were not unheard of.
What Was In It For Fiat?
So, what did Fiat stand to gain in all of this? As it turns out, not a whole lot. When Gianni Agnelli spoke of the deal to the New York Times in 1972, he claimed “we did not make any money on the deal, but there were a lot of other benefits…we have trained a lot of our engineers in the construction of a plant of such magnitude under very difficult conditions.” Ever the mix of quasi-statesman and salesman, he continued, “What we like best of all, however, is the fact that a very large number of cars rolling in Russia are Fiats.” In financial terms, Fiat made a measly $50 million dollars off the deal. However, Agnelli was well aware that he wasn’t the only salesman of small cars on the block. Fiat had worked hard to protect their own market by encouraging the Italian government (and it can’t really be understated how much influence Fiat had on the Italian government in the 60’s and 70’s) to maintain a strict voluntary export restraint on Japanese automobiles, limiting imports and exports to only 2,000 units per year, as noted in “Effects of European VERs on Japanese Autos” by Jaime de Melo and Patrick Messerlin, a working paper for The World Bank in 1988. Fiat’s presence in a planned economy meant they could claim the territory for themselves and block entry to Japanese automakers.
Fiat also worked hard to protect its domestic material supplies from imports. Textiles, chemicals, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and machinery and transport equipment were all commodity groups with some of the highest numbers of import quota restrictions, and those restrictions were tightest on “centrally planned economies,” according to The World Bank.
In 1977, there were 139 separate restricted categories from centrally planned economies versus just 34 categories for Japan, the next most restricted exporter. Fiat and other fully or partially Agnelli-controlled companies all worked with these protected commodities. They also had the benefit of rather efficient steel production right in their Northern Italian backyard. The area around Brescia had about 80 “mini mills,” small steel production plants that recycled scrap into usable bars, rods, and sheets. By 1982, the US Department of Commerce launched an investigation into subsidization and dumping of steel by European countries and found the state-owned steel firm Italsider was subsidized at a whopping 26% and the Falck Steel company (the largest in Italy a decade earlier) was subsidized at 17%, among the highest of the companies called out. Italy had plenty of their own steel, did not want anybody else’s, and especially did not want Soviet steel.
Then Why All The Iron Oxide?
So why did the cars rust so badly? Was it really that bad in the first place? Well, as the lovely Jason Torchinsky pointed out in the case of the Lancia Beta, some of it was down to design. I happen to own a relatively early build Lancia Beta Scorpion and will gleefully defend the mostly rust-free honor of my car. Some Betas were built with a U-shaped channel in the subframe at the rear of the engine that could accumulate water and dirt, which could certainly lead to rust. Some unfortunate British TV coverage really didn’t help, and Lancia never recovered in the UK market, despite adding an anti-corrosion warranty.
Much of the problem was due to labor and quality issues that afflicted the entire Italian automotive industry at the time. Strikes occurred at the Fiat and Lancia plants frequently and they shared this problem with Alfa Romeo, which was not owned by Fiat at the time. Here, we can look to research done by Italian automotive historian Matteo Licata, who points to improvements in primer coatings and plastic sealants as well as better industrial relations as the turning point for the similarly rust-prone Alfasud.
Starting in 1968, the “Hot Autumn” strikes seriously crippled the Fiat Mirafiori plant. (LINK: ) What could start out as a handful of workers walking off in a wildcat strike could balloon into thousands of workers demanding raises by the time they reached the head offices. This eventually spiraled into three executives being murdered by 1979, nineteen others kneecapped or wounded, and eighteen cases of arson at Fiat factories.
Downing tools in the middle of the work day left parts in the open, untreated, or poorly installed. Quality could suffer intensely as a result of discontent and poor training. A builder of Fiat X1/9 race cars I spoke with recounted removing seam sealer and undercoating from a vehicle and finding one side had fourteen pounds and the other just four. Many body panels were poorly spot-welded and edge seams left unsealed, allowing for moisture intrusion. And then there’s the simple fact that cars just rusted more in that era. Roads were more heavily salted, and as David Tracy has found out, cars of a certain age from salted regions suffer far more than those from the unsalted lands.
In the end, Russian steel was most likely not a culprit at all for Italian rust. Unfortunately, the blame can more accurately be placed on iffy workmanship and a particularly long patch of difficult worker relations, combined with simply less emphasis on rustproofing. That’s not to say you should take a pass on the Italian heap of your dreams. Most of them that still survive have been sorted out over the last fifty years or so. You’ll also get to enjoy dozens of raised eyebrows at car events and can now pass along the facts of 100% pure Italian rust.
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Fantastic article. As the owner of multiple Fiats from before the US resurrection, I was (and continue to be) a brand ambassador. I’ve owned 3 X1/9 models, and 2 Spider 2000 models. All had a little bit of rust somewhere, but no more than other cars from the same era.
Great article! This was well-written; I learned something and really appreciate that you didn’t ramble. Some of the educational posts here are roughly twice as wordy as needed. The editors should use this as an example of a post done right.
Meanwhile the old site is doing posts on things like “why do cars have wheels.”
Great article.
Haha, 100% pure Italian rust!
Kudos on a wonderfully researched article. Between you and Mercedes in particular (no shade on the rest of the team), when I visit the site I feel like I have attended a class in “Something Interesting That You Didn’t Know You Would FInd Interesting”
I’m an old guy and I never heard about Russian steel and Fiats. Fascinating article. To me the best part is learning that you own a Scorpion. Very Cool!
You missed one of the most important aspects of this discussion, attributable to most cars designed and built in that era. Rust proofing, any form, added expense. Those cars were built to a price point. Additionally, during that time period, cars were considered disposable. No one thought they would be cherished by future collectors. If you ever had the opportunity to restore a 124, whether it be a Spider or a Coupe, you’ll note the insides of the quarter panels, fenders and other parts are not even primered—bare metal. They simply couldn’t spare the expense, or time. Doing this brings the cars up to near modern levels of corrosion protection. My 124 Coupe, now well past the half century mark, has no rust because of that little alteration.
Interesting…my 500 came out of the Torino factory in 1960 and the inner panels have a layer of primer. It’s been a while, but when I stripped the car, I don’t recall seeing any bare metal surfaces on the inner panels and overall, the body in good shape and replaced only a small amount. The most damage was to the front face; the battery sits right behind it and looked like it had leaked at one point.
The original undercoat is definitely not the best and pretty much all the suspension parts and metal electrical components were rotted out. Also had to do a complete engine re-build.
Things were better earlier; late sixties to late seventies were deplorable.
I have heard elsewhere (Martin Buckley, perhaps?) that much of the sheetmetal (wherever it came from) was stored outside and was often rusting before it was even primered or painted.
I vaguely remember mention of that—but think it was specifically about sheet metal going to AMC. Perhaps an article at the Old Site?
I’m pretty sure Martin Buckley wrote about that in C&SC.
It’s hard to wrap my mind around how bad life was in the centrally planned economies of last century.
They made 200,000 cars in 1965 while the US made 11 million.
Just 4 cars for every thousand people we truly are blessed to live in such times of luxury.
The entire mileage of paved roads in all of Russia in 1966 was equivalent to the miles of paved roads in Michigan at the time. There were all of two gas stations on the road between Moscow and Leningrad iirc. But this was entirely by design as the Soviet leadership did not want their people to have easy access to personal transportation. The elites needed cars to get between home, work and their dacha, everyone else just needed the bus between work and home and a train ticket to the health resort for a week or so every year. To let everyone have their own cars was simply seen as “too American.”
Great article, I appreciate the research that went into it also. The communist period is interesting to me for exactly these kinds of reasons. Leaders just deciding what the people wanted, and trying to plan it all. Grateful to have been born on the western side of the iron curtain.
This was building from the Czarist idea that they didn’t want industrialization because they didn’t want a class of captains of industry, and would’ve preferred to have no merchant class, meaning that Russia didn’t really start to industrialize until after the 1917 Revolution in contrast to America which was one of the first countries into the Industrial Revolution and had become the largest by the time of the Russian Revolution.
Thanks for the extra information and the article. Soviet Russia sounds even more horrible now.
The East Germans had different idea about the car ownership than Soviet Union. What kept the East Germans from being “too American” was severely restricted supply of raw material, namely metal, even though they could theoretically build hundreds of thousands of Trabant bodies from waste cotton and resin a year.
In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, East Germans were allowed to own the western vehicles that were “gifted” by their wealthy relatives through “Genex” (the article is in German), the East German equivalent of Sears catalogue that the western relatives could order for their eternally grateful East German relatives.
East German government often bought many western vehicles to be given to the ideologically favoured people and to be sold to the public. East Germans, flustered with large wads of western currencies or “ill-gotten” Ostmark, could purchase western vehicles such as Mazda, Volkswagen, Peugeot, and others.
About 27,000 Volkswagen Golf Mk1 were imported in East Germany with most sold to the public: the price was three to five times (M. 27,000 to 35,000) more than Trabant (M. 8,000). Mazda 323 (BD, fifth generation) was another western vehicle along with Peugeot 205.
When I visited East Germany in April 1989, I was surprised to see lot of Mazda 323, Volkswagen Golf, Peugeot 205, and a few others with DDR stickers and numberplates in East Berlin. I even saw one Mercedes-Benz 300 SE (1986–1989).
East Germany was technically the wealthiest and most developed country in the Soviet bloc, mainly because it was formerly a part of Germany. And also because the USSR gave them more favorable trade deals than other Warsaw Pact members
I come from a part of Canada SW Ontario famous for Sifto the salt miners in Goderich.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Goderich+Salt+Mine/@43.742602,-81.7209829,15z/data=!3m1!4b1?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDcwNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Anyway we got salt, winter road safety, politicians (salt makes jobs!) and at one time we had Ladas and Fiats too.
Lada advertised “made with hot rolled steel”. Fiat did not.
With the odd exception Ladas turned to flakes and disappeared in a couple of years. Fiats would last longer and rust slowly behind Tony’s garage, typically hostages of unpaid repair bills.
Great article.
Our ’74 Fiat never rusted in the 5 years we owned it in spite of living in areas of copious salt use (Indianapolis and Cleveland). The reason was that the car wouldn’t start under 32 degrees (sometimes under 50). I figure it wasn’t exposed to much salt since it mostly sat in an apartment parking lot (later an apartment parking garage) and finally a home garage.
That is for body rust. At one point we only needed 1 car for a couple of months in the summer (we had a deeply rusted ’73 Plymouth Duster that always started) so our 128 sat unused in the garage for 2 months at which time the parking brake rusted ON. A tow truck had to drag it out of the garage leaving tire tracks on the driveway. The tow truck driver had a very good laugh.
Andrea, I appreciate a good deep dive like this one. The Autopian stands out for offering up so many (often under a Mercedes S. byline). I look forward to more from you.
I hate Soviet cars (first Volga excluded) with a passion, as I had to live with them, but if there is ONE thing Italians don’t need to do a crappy job, it’s Russians. Italians can mess up very well all on their own.
As much as I dislike the Zhiguli (Jee-goo-lee) – its body actually came with thicker sheet metal and extra gusseting to reinforce it, and they didn’t rust much more than anything from that era, and certainly less than anything Italian of the time.
Italians used, back then, to paint the underbody directly, no protective undercoat whatsoever. And this was in the best of days. On the average ones, they had their strikes, and all their Italianisms.
It is insulting for a country which managed to keep a healthy tradition of electric gremlins through SEVERAL generations of engineers (a Miura would catch fire just as well as a 2025 Milano would light its dash Christmass style, that’s about 60 years of consistently engineering crap) to be accused of needing the Soviets to build cars that rust. Come on now.
The left front window regulator on my Marea briefly forgot how to regulate it’s window last week before remembering the next morning. It may have been on strike though, I didn’t ask
Seeing as you’re well-acquainted with italian-made electrical gremlins, are you familiar with a little-known british company named Lucas?
The Prince of Darkness ?
When the original Denshigiken starter died on my CRX I was quite upset, because the absolutely identical Lucas (from a Rover with a Honda engine) that replaced it no longer did the bzi-bzi-bzi Japanese Motorcycle starter motor noise. It went to a regular car-like wo-wo-wo.
They were otherwise perfectly identical externally.
Other than that, it held fine.
I have personally seen a Miura catch on fire, an F40 catch on fire, and a relative’s Alfa 90 2.5 V6 caught on fire and burned out entirely (in Alfa Romeo’s defense the 90 was chip tuned).
My personal belief is the only way to know if the Soviet steel story is real would be to find access to the union contracts of the Fiat auto workers. Said unions were communists and would logically use the bargaining chip of demanding materials sourced from socialist nations.
I have no proof of this, but I do have a proof of concept to compare: when working on my Motobecane moped from 1978, the rear wheel bearing needed replacement. What was removed was a Soviet era Russian bearing. It is well known much of orginaized labor in Europe of the time were Communists looking for the smallest reason to strike.
You are certainly right that there were plenty of communists within the unionized Fiat workers, but from what I found, Russia struggled just to make enough parts for their own cars AND a not insignificant percentage of parts that were manufactured were smuggled out of the factories and into the black market. This became even more prevalent as time went on. Then, with the trade barriers Italy held up against “centrally planned economies,” even the powerful unions would have struggled to help their international comrades in this way. All that being said, I would love to find and read unions contracts from the era!
I wonder if part of the reason the story of ‘Soviet steel’ became widespread is people blaming Italian communists for the rust, and others assuming that ‘communists == Russia’
I’ve heard the Russian steel story before – I figured it made sense, thanks for the clarification.
If you can find it, PJ O’Rourke wrote a great article for Car and Driver about touring the Lada plant. I keep waiting for C&D to put it on their site, but nothing so far.
While the Tolyatti plant may not be open to westerners for tours these days, I did manage to find a virtual tour of the nearby AvtoVAZ museum. It pretty much looks how you’d expect, but there are some truly wild concepts on display from the late 90’s/early 2000s that have me convinced their designers had switched from vodka to ether out of pure desperation
Interesting article. In the mid 1980s, my 5th grade teacher had a brand new Fiat. This I remember for several reasons. 1) No else in our little town had one, so it was a bit of a curiosity. 2) Agnelli was supposedly a distant relative on my mother’s side of the family (though her maiden name was Agnello so this has always seemed even more suspect than it did at first glance). That said, of course I told her and everyone else this was indeed an indisputable fact. 3) I remember hearing then the exact same story about Fiats rusting because they were made with inferior Soviet steel. This was added to the many suspicious and accusatory comments leveled at my brave teacher for bringing a weird Italian car to a rural PA town in 1985. So it goes.
Fiats (and other Italian cars) don’t really rust worse than most anything else of that era, and are better than most Japanese cars. The only cars that had decent rust-proofing in the 70s and early 80s were Volvos, Saabs, and Porsches, Porsche being one of the very first to go with hot-dip galvanizing. Audi being second, IIRC. Volvo and Saab just went with pretty good coatings and designs that avoid mudtraps, though not entirely. Everything got much better in the mid-80s to the mid-90s, then the Germans in particular back-slid horribly around the turn of the century when the environmentalist movement convinced them that “green” less-toxic materials and making car parts more easily recyclable was a grand idea. That took a good few years to work the bugs out.
I had two ’86 Alfas that all things considered weren’t bad. My Spider had some rust, but it lived on coastal Long Island before I bought it. My GTV-6 was completely rot free. It was from down south somewhere originally.
Japanese cars of the time had to account with steel in much shorter supply and at much higher prices. Japan had cheaper labor but almost all of their materials were imported with no discounts.
So at least they had some sort of excuse – they were not worse rust-proofed than the others, just had thinner sheet metal wherever possible.
Italians had no excuse.
The Japanese and Italian economies share a lot of post-war similarities. While Japan went for paper thin sheet metal, the Italians just opted to go with fabric roofs to save metal on the 500s and lean into the whole “dolce vita” vibe of it. Thus an icon was born!
We call that style. I appreciate it.
It was mostly just the technology of the day.
AMC also started dipping their entire body shells into chromate primer in the late ’50s and began using hot dip galvanizing on the most vulnerable body parts in the early ’60s, and began galvanizing all panels in the late 1970s (also shipping cars with factory Ziebart treatments at that time). They still rusted, and as unibodies, could still get pretty bad, but efforts were being made. Also had ceramic coated mufflers in the early ’60s, I had a ’61 Rambler until last year that still had its original after almost 65 years.
Whatever they were doing didn’t work for poop. AMC cars were notorious rot-boxes here in Maine.
My parents bought a 1974 Fiat X1/9 new and after about a year or so it was already showing signs of rust. We used to joke that if you listened closely you could hear it rusting. The overall build quality of that car was so bad that it made the Renault LeCar they bought a few years later seem like an S-Class Mercedes in comparison.
Well I loved my R5 in orange. I have not yet owned an Italian car but want a 500C. I’ve had German. French. Engish Japanese. American ( tho never a GM) and Australian (mercury capri) and I lust after a DS 21. There are worst illnesses, but I would truly love the Electric remake of the R5. I think I need to move to Europe
We had a ’81 X-1/9 that had been brought in by a previous owner from Hawaii. I found no rust on it at all
Funny enough, I came home from the hospital as a newborn in a LeCar! Obviously I’ve progressed in life nicely as my Lancia feels very Mercedes-ish to sit in.
Comments like that are why this article was written…to dispel old wives tales, often rooted in some form of nationalism or xenophobia. I have an X1/9 in my collection. She’s currently at 340,000 miles, on the second engine. I blew up the first one at Willow Springs coming out of the esses, after inhaling a dust cloud from a spinning Nissan 300ZX, who fried his brakes after three laps of me having glued myself to his rear bumper.
My comment represent my personal experience 50 years ago, I’m glad your X1/9 was a better car than my parents’ car.
It wasn’t just the rust–and by the time they sold it three years later it had a lot of it, good thing it was brown–but the build quality was abysmal. Cold starting the engine was not easy, it usually took multiple tries to get it started. That got fixed after the warranty ran out and my dad removed all the emissions equipment and replaced the factory carb–he might have put dual Webers on it. The interior plastics were terrible and brittle even when it was new–the drivers seatback broke while it was still under factory warranty.
The poor experience with the X1/9 didn’t stop me from buying three Fiats in the 1980s, two Spider 2000s and a Brava. All three were substantially better built than the X1/9 and while they still had the occasional problem I have much better memories of those than I do the X1/9.
Oh it gets worse. About six months before they bought the Fiat they sold their 2002 and bought a used Citroen SM. And for over a year those were their only two cars.
My dad owned a couple of Fiat 128s, a 72 and a 76 IIRC. Many times he mentioned how badly they rusted. 4 years before terminal rust is pretty awful but probably not that far off many other cars from that era. The second was traded in or scrapped, he was never clear, when I was about 2 months old and he went to rotate the tires and the car went up then down as it collapsed around the jack.
At least he always had fond memories of how fun they were to drive compared to anything else he had driven at that time.
I heard a similar story back when I had a first gen RX7, something along the lines of they rust faster because they’re made of recycled steel from sunken warships from WW2.
(Obviously it’s not true because that steel is incredibly more valuable than fresh steel)
I’ve heard that. Non atomic steel from sunk warships. Can’t remember why it is so valuable.
Edit: just scrolled down and caught the conversation about it.
Sub-par steel = Fiat currency?
Forge It Again, Tovarisch
*golf clap* 🙂
amazing article, Great work!
Top quality research! Thanks for this – I’ve heard this Russian steel/rust comment many times. Meanwhile, I’ve seen plenty of seriously corroded ’60s and ’70s domestics.
Maybe it’s because they benchmarked against the Vega?
or International Harvester
I read a story that said all steel manufactured after WW2 is contaminated with some amount of radioactive material. Not enough to be toxic, of course, but radioactive enough to interfere with extremely sensitive equipment. The steel required for that type of equipment is made from Pre-WW2 steel, called Low Background Steel.
To get the ‘low background steel’ you can fish the sunken warships ships out of the ocean…which people do…many illegally.
“Guys, it the Coast Guard, just be cool! Don’t drop the rod!”
“Say, whatcha fellas fishing for?”
“Probable cause! We don’t have to tell you! We’re not steeling anything. What is this, a background check?! Uhhhh, radiation! What are YOU fishing for??”
I hear the Titanic has lots of such steel and there’s a company that can take you down to it.
Taking you back up however…
The steel in Titanic (and Olympic and Britannic) was poor quality – particularly the rivets – which made the hulls brittle and easy for ice (and ships and mines) to punch wide open.
North Atlantic liners built with very high quality steel?
Normandie and United States.
Normandie was melted down and built into tanks and weapons for WWII
United States is being sunk rather than scrapped – A massive waste.
Eh. Quantity, not quality.
The SS United States isn’t pre-atomic steel, though.
If the half-life for atomic steel is 5.26 years – I’m sure there’s zero concern 73 years later…
….I’d be more concerned about all the peeling lead paint.
Normandie was only partially scrapped in WWII, they had to remove the superstructure and funnels to raise it, but the rest of it sat around until after the war, after it became crystal clear that it was not economical to rebuild it. Would have just mixed in with all the other recycled steel being collected for scrap drives at the time
Yes, so if you happen to have a sunken warship or something at your beach house…
There once was a guy who lived not too far from me who had a propeller off the Lusitania as a lawn ornament.
I just saw that movie on Apple TV.
How does that work? I heard the same story too, but it makes no sense to me.
For me, the ore is underground until taken out, then it gets contaminated by radiation in the air, but so would be the steel from the ships sunken before 1945.
I thought it would have been coming from the carbon, but it turns out it was pulling it from the air. We’re talking crazy tiny amounts here, but it’s still kind of nuts that we turned all the air everywhere radioactive from atmospheric testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
isn’t the recovered steel still smelted, and still undergo the same process? i am not a metallurgist, but i am really curious about the topic
I don’t think so and for 2 reasons, but am not 100% sure. I think it only gets absorbed during the initial conversion from iron to steel, not when it gets remelted, and most importantly by now almost all of the radiation has ‘radiated’ away and turned into inert metals so it’s rarely still needed except in the most sensitive of things.
Pre-atmospheric nuclear detonation steel is no longer sought after, being free of certain ferrous isotopes. We can compensate for it now.
Also, because of the wind down of atmospheric nuclear testing, radiation levels have declined to barely above normal background levels, from +2.40 mSv/yr in 1963 to less than +0.005 mSv/yr, so the difference between pre-atomic steel and new steel is pretty negligible now.
The ore needs to be smelted to make steel. That’s where the radionucleotides get in.
thanks. i did not know that
NM