All that I remember about the car VAZ 2101

At that time I was probably not even 3 years old when the first car appeared in the family. And it was a domestic VAZ 2101 colloquially called "Kopeyka". And it was back in the distant times of the USSR, when life was, as it seemed to me, just a fairy tale. While we bought ourselves a penny, and it was somewhere in the beginning of 1990, there was not a single car in our village, with the exception of a couple of old Cossacks, and our joy knew no bounds. I still remember how, immediately after buying this “Kopeyka”, my father and the men built a garage in haste from a block, which, by the way, stood for more than 15 years, until the current owners of the old house destroyed it.

As now, I remember our first family car, it was bright orange with shiny chrome wheel covers, shiny metal door handles and chrome strips along the entire length of the car body. I remember in fragments that in the cabin of our “Kopeyka” there were seats trimmed with brown leatherette, a black square instrument panel on which the speedometer always did not work, and I was constantly annoyed in my childhood that it was not clear how fast we were driving. And I also remember very well the glass handle on the gear lever in the form of a rose. For a long time, when the car was in the family, our VAZ 2101 has seen a lot of roads, and we traveled almost the whole country on it, and not only Russia, since we lived in the USSR.

Often my father drove Kopeyka to Kiev, Ukraine, which is about 800 km one way. And I drove the car twice for capital repairs, or rather did not even drive it, but transported it on the body of a KAMAZ. And now, according to our times, it is simply impossible, for one only gasoline or salar, in order to refuel KAMAZ, you need to give half the cost of that very penny. And in those days, gasoline cost a penny, went to Gomel for spare parts, bought rubber for the whole collective farm at GAZ-53. Every week we drove our car to the regional center to visit, and this is almost 200 km one way, and there was not a single case that we broke down on the road, and if there were minor breakdowns, my father quickly eliminated them.

Here is a little story about our first family car Zhiguli, which stayed in our family for quite a long time, certainly not less than 7 years, and was successfully sold for 4000 rubles, at that time it was good money, even very good. But the memories of this zero first will forever remain in our memory, as the very first and best domestic car at that time.