1986 Dacia 500 from Romania - Comments

Nothing major. At one point the windscreen wipers refused to work. The radiator had also leaked.

He interior is probably the worst thing. It's really cramped and of very bad quality, and everything falls off or apart. The passenger window didn't open, and there were rips all over the place, which are happily now mended.

The Dacia 500 is also called Lastun. It was the first car designed and built in Romania. The body is made all out of glassfibre, which is really good as the body doesn't rust (it leaks, falls apart, but at least it doesn't rust!).

In Romania this car is a total joke. Its tiny space, the poor performance (top speed over 100 km/h is listed, but mine doesn't go past 80), and the glassfibre body have given rise to incredibly many jokes - I suppose that the British equivalent is the Robin Reliant!

The car is certainly not attractive on the outside - the styling is early eighties and looks as if it were designed in the lunch hour (knowing Communist bosses, it probably was!), and the crudity of design is apparent on the inside as well with a very poor finish where everything falls off.

In Romania there are extremely few of them on the roads, so parts are not the easiest thing to get. Probably nobody wants to be seen (or can fit) behind the wheel of such a joke car. However, for the forty dollars I paid for it, it goes and that's the main thing.

And the best thing? The economy. This car does about 3.5 litres to 100 km; I think that's about 80 m.p.g., which makes it really cheap to run, and an ideal little car for use in the city. So - it's not all bad!

But I don't use it very much except for going around my town - you can't really take it out on the big roads, and the engine often has minor faults which leave you stranded.

Overall,

It's terribly designed,

terribly built,

with terrible performance,

terrible space,

amazing economy,

and cheap transport.

So I suppose it's better than walking.

This car was designed entirely by the students at the Timisoara University, and the design and the testing procedures were not 100% completed at the time that the Ceausescu government imposed to build a special line for the construction of the car. This is why it is a generally bad looking car...

Bogdan.

By the way, the engine is the best thing: it is a half of an Oltcit engine (the other romanian car, built after the Citroen Visa).

Aaaa...i do not know who wrote the "review", but what he wrote is kind of stupid...

The radiator is leaking?!?

WHAT RADIATOR???

This cad does NOT have a radiator. It is a half of the Citroen Visa (Oltcit) engine, and it is cooled with... AIR!!!

So...sorry...but...

I don`t think that this car exists anymore on the roads! Maybe abandoned.

Actually I saw one on the road the other days. It was working!!

No, the Lastun engine is not half an Oltcit once, but a specially designed one built and designed in Timisoara beginning in 1983. This is just a myth which is very commonly heard... it's like saying the Trabant is made out of cardboard.

Incidentally, the Lastun is the first Romanian car to use curved side glass.

This is the best romanian car built. Too bad the concept wasn't finished and the material that were used were very low quality! Some more interest in that car and Daewoo Tico and Matiz wouldn't have been sold in Romania.

Half the engine in a Oltcit? That engine is an Oltcit engine and it's the one in the Oltcit SPECIAL with an 650 cc engine, 2 cylinders, boxer, air cooled, 34hp@5250rpm, max rpm 6250, top speed121 in the Oltcit, which weighs about 850 kg... With that Lastun would have been like a true GTI! Be serious, the engine is totally different, although some parts might be identical.

I believe it had only 2 cylinders vertical.

Also the crankshaft was different than oltcit; (maybe pistons identical with oltcit).

Balancing (due to faulty design) was wrong; it had 2 pistons up at the same time.

Should have had one at TDC and one at BDC.

Cmon guys... are you talking about carz or what, except this logan... which is...hmm good... the rest its not so... are they still giving a gun with 2 bullets for thatone who gonna buy oltcit or old dacia?probably you`re asking why 2 bullets... one for thatone who sold it... the otherone for the owner... before 10 years was like that :) )