By Kamil Kaluski
Welcome to another episode of the Mystery Car series. Today we have a tastefully rusted candidate for your guessing pleasure. It shouldn’t be too hard but it may be tricky. Make and model, please.
There were several winners last week across multiple platforms. I am not sure who got the right answer first but congratulations to you. Here is the full image of the Mazda E2200 van. On my last trip to Warsaw I judged it to be just enough interesting to take a picture of.
https://topgear.nl/thumbs/hd/2018/08/daewoo-matiz-0-8i-europe-3-eigenaar-nap-apk-2.jpg
First-gen (and pre-facelift) Daewoo Matiz? And, as such, with a 0.8L I3?
Is it a bad thing to have recognised that?
Actually the car in the picture would be the Daewoo-fso Matiz, made in the Żerań plant in Warsaw, and not in Korea. But yeah, you guessed the car correctly, there’s still a tonne of these rust-buckets in Poland by the way.
Fair – the Polish connection was a safe bet with Kamil, I just defaulted to standard Daewoo upon seeing just how many names the little thing was sold under.
Yeah, I mean it’s mostly nitpciking on my side. And the car was still sold as a daewoo in Poland, only the vin plate would say “daewoo-Fso”.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/909/991/48c.jpg
Actually, I did some additional reasearch, and the car might as well be just labelled “Fso”, beacause after Daewoo went bust, and was bought by Gm, the Polish factory (FSO) lost rights to the name, and had to sell the car under a different brand, hence you got the “FSO Matiz”. Thought the number of such cars produced was pretty small, beacause at that time the demand for it was mariginal. Sorry for overloading this comment section with complety needles information.
I prefer to believe that the comment section, and indeed the entire website, together serve as evidence that there’s no such thing as completely needless automotive information.
When the collectors start paying hundreds of thousands of monetary units for these they will need to know whether they bought a real, rare FSO Matiz or a bread-and-butter DAEWOO-FSO. There might be fakes around already!
These collectors will thankfully refer to Jakub’s references here.
Is it a bad thing to have recognised that?
I onced pushed one of those to 140 kph…looking death in the eye one gust of wind at a time.
C’mon, it’s a relatively modern fwd car. For real death potential you need an old rwd car like a Fiat Abarth
The Matiz at 140 is as unbecoming as a Fiat 500 at 85.
Edit for clarity: early generations of the Fiat, current ones are probably on par.
Yes I meant the early ones too, people have modified them to go that fast.
The specs of the Matiz are quite close to an Imp Sport, the twin carb version (50hp, 90mph top speed) except for being ~10% heavier, longer wheelbase and taller. I’ve been that fast or more in an Imp a couple of times, the steering is never horrible but susceptibility to crosswinds is an issue, due to the rear weight bias – the CoG is behind the centre of pressure. Luckily I didn’t have crosswinds.
When I drove it for a week, “modern” was not a word that came to mind. I mean, it’s very light, so tiny that it feels like an extension of your body, and it doesn’t feel as underpowered as it seems on paper as long as you stick to city streets. But the steering is horrible above 100 kph and it takes an hour with a brick on the gas to get to 140. This whole experience is now 15-17 years ago, too, so I wonder if I would even go that fast today.
Or perhaps not as sorted as it should be safety wise. From Autocar and it’s road test of this car’s replacement…
“Autocar has had a difficult relationship with the Matiz. In its original incarnation, as a Daewoo, we rolled two examples while reversing at low speed, which led to grave concerns about its stability” i.e. referring to this actual model, this mystery car. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/first-drives/small-but-not-perfectly-formed
The only car in the history of Autocar to have this problem. This test resulted in all cars, at least for the British market, getting a speed limiter for reverse gear. One of very few cars they gave a zero star test rating, essentially, a ‘do not buy this car flag’.
http://www.theautomotiveindia.com/forums/data/attachments/136/136697-c7cff9b8d4bb6631d2ba56e18ed9259f.jpg
I’ve no doubt it was crap, but trying to do a J-turn in such a narrow tall un-dynamic car seems a bit stupid. 20 km/h isn’t that slow in reverse, where the steering wheels have a lot more leverage.
“The only car in the history of Autocar to have this problem.”
Autocar is the world’s oldest car magazine, established in 1895, so in over 100 years of repeating this manouvre, this was the first time it happened.
Is a reverse J-turn a regular part of their testing procedure?!?
Yes it is, and has been. Don’t forget that it was magazine testing that revealed the Mercedes Benz A-Class W163 rollover problem, that was from a Swedish magazine. Of all the English language magazines available worldwide, I still find Autocar the best. I’ve been reading it every week since 1970.
Thanks, I hadn’t expected that. Given the wheel rim dug in and tripped it up I wonder if a simple low recommended tyre pressure was the straw that sent the camel rolling over.
…and this is a magazines that no doubt had a few three wheelers through its tests over the years.
Exactly, which, of course, adds a useful context.
The Autotest fraternity needs to know what will be a competitive car in 10 years time, this is vital consumer information. I mean there’s only so many EP90 Toyota Starlets out there.
Oh boy, I did not know that. Amazing.
Oh boy, I did not know that. Amazing.
How the new Matiz performs depends greatly on where it is driven. At low speeds around town it is terrific. (…) When the road opens up, however, it’s less convincing and the engine feels out of its depth at motorway speeds. The three-cylinder sounds thrashy above 5000rpm and wind buffeting makes the whole experience rather unpleasant.
Also the worst braking distance of any car on sale at the time, which is pretty poor for such a light car. I honestly don’t know why anyone bought one, they were cheap, but not that cheap and if you wanted a death trap you could still buy a Citroen Saxo (and possibly the last of the original Rover minis) , at least those were fun death traps.
Autocar have a knack for discovering safety flaws, like the way the Suzuki Celerio had a brake pedal design flaw which they found when snapped under heavy braking. Pedal boxes are designed to break away from the driver these days to prevent foot injuries, but it shouldn’t have snapped under the test conditions. In fairness to Autocar and Suzuki, Autocar didn’t sensationalize it, Suzuki fixed the issue, and Autocar gave the same coverage to stressing Suzuki had addressed the issue properly.
Also the worst braking distance of any car on sale at the time, which is pretty poor for such a light car. I honestly don’t know why anyone bought one, they were cheap, but not that cheap and if you wanted a death trap you could still buy a Citroen Saxo (and possibly the last of the original Rover minis) , at least those were fun death traps.
Autocar have a knack for discovering safety flaws, like the way the Suzuki Celerio had a brake pedal design flaw which they found when snapped under heavy braking. Pedal boxes are designed to break away from the driver these days to prevent foot injuries, but it shouldn’t have snapped under the test conditions. In fairness to Autocar and Suzuki, Autocar didn’t sensationalize it, Suzuki fixed the issue, and Autocar gave the same coverage to stressing Suzuki had addressed the issue properly.
They have a knack, because they do their job properly, and have been doing since they invented the roadtest to consistently, objectively and dispassionately grade the worth of the cars they assess.
I can only give them black marks of late for letting Steve Sutcliffe go (but who knows why that happened), but other than that, yeah there’s no non-specialist magazine that tops it as an all round car mag. Evo is good for a more enthusiast perspective, but can get lost up its own bum sometimes.
Where else but on Hooniverse would there be such a lengthy, well informed discussion about a freaking Daewoo-fso Matiz? Gotta love this place.