In Turkey, it seems motoring here is in the old soviet style of automobiles of Lada, FSO, Yugo and old style Skoda, the latter being a different type of vehicle to today’s VW based sub brand.

These two cars are massively popular everywhere in Turkey.   Probably together they make up a third of all the vehicles I’ve seen here.   The left is a ‘Tofas’ a boxy Fiat derived saloon built in Turkey just Lada did.   The right is a Renault 12, which was built by Renault’s Turkey plant along side the modern Clio, Megane and Laguna range.  This car was sold by Dacia of Romania until they made a recent comeback making simple cheap vehicles for Europe again today, and building a lot of them in Morocco.   As you can see, to make your Tofas a bit more special, a lot of them are souped up with alloys and big sound systems.

I can’t see any real special feature in the R12 and Tofas apart from they were cheap, gave factory workers jobs until I guess people insisted on modern safety standards and emissions.  They were made as recent as 2002.

Nowadays Renault Turkey built some modern electric vehicles for Israel’s “Better place” company, a sadly shortlived project that was to make the Holy Land’s roads with cars with no fossil fuel products at all.

Some of the religious Turks seem to have stickers on their cars like this with ‘Masallah’ which I guess they are relying on Islam to keep them safer drivers.   Driving isn’t too bad here, or at least until I got to a really big city like Adana which seemed chaotic.

Much of the middle east has scrap yards where people can get their motoring down to a cheaper price using second hand bits.   I didn’t see any here.   I did see some abandoned cars left in bits at the side of the roads which surprised me as I thought the cost of scrap metal would mean that there would be a big incentive to have them hauled away.

I think Turkey is generally a very industrious country and there seems to be metal workshops,. farms, carpentry shops and all kinds of factories all over the place.

Related: Crap car spotting in Morocco

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