Four adults, a pig, a sink, and 100kg of potatoes

Through a fairly convoluted series of events, political turmoil, the fall of the iron curtain, dictators, revolutions, and so on, Renault came to have a stake in making cars in Romania. The company Renault is partnered with (or bought out) is called Dacia and they used to make various Renaults, and Renault-derived-things, under licence. They were still making Renault 12 based cars until very recently.

For some reason, they called their new model the Logan.


A Renault/Dacia Logan.

Apparently, the brief for the car was that it be able to carry "four adults, a pig, a sink, and 100 kilos of potatoes" because

"Romanians use their cars for everything, including the transport of pigs. Until now, they have had small, poorly designed cars -- there was a real need for a car that could transport a lot of goods. The product-planning brief was a value-for-money car with a lot of space. And it had to have the stately look of a sedan."

The last car to have that sort of brief was Citroen's iconic 2CV[0].

For simplicity's sake, the Logan has lots of "features" designed in, like rear-vision mirrors that are symmetrical left and right, so safe on manufacturing costs of different-sided mirrors. The windscreen is not a compound curve and the dashboard is one injection-molded piece.

In a sort of Renault-refutes-the-decline-of-Eastern-Europe moment

The simple design means assembly at the Romanian plant is done almost entirely without robots. That lets Renault capitalize on the country's low labor costs. Gross pay for a Dacia line worker is $324 per month, vs. an average $4,723 a month for auto workers in Western Europe. Now, Renault is ramping up production of the Logan from Russia to Morocco. "The investment in manufacturing is relatively low, so you can have factories that don't have to produce huge volumes to finance themselves," says Christoph Stürmer, senior analyst at researcher Global Insight in Frankfurt.

Even more weirdly, people in the Western Europe are getting in to the Logan, mostly for it's bargain price of about 5000 Euros (AUD$7900 today) which is about half the price of a similarly sized (ok, probably slightly larger) Ford Focus.

When Googling for more Logan info, I stumbled across "Halfway down the Danube" and I love the second comment in this post:

How easy is the Logan to work on or modify? One of the virtues of the old VW "Bug" (like the old Ford Model-A before that) was that even a semi-handy novice could drop the engine to rebuild it or soup it up.

Don't tell that guy about the Renault Clio 182's engine.

[0] Something like "to be able to carry X, Y, Z and a dozen eggs across a freshly plowed field and not break any eggs.
[1] A term that always sounds so condescending.