Word: fiat
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...snowy plain near the Volga River 625 miles southeast of Moscow stands the most important monument to East-West trade yet erected: the $800 million Togliatti auto plant. Completed in 1970 and equipped by Italy's Fiat, the plant is scheduled to turn out some 500,000 sedans this year. For businessmen throughout the West, Togliatti's completion stands as proof that capitalists and Communists can cooperate in a major industrial venture. But for Fiat, the experience has been a virtually profitless ordeal...
...Fiat Chairman Giovanni Agnelli concedes that the company has done no better than break even on the contract; unexpected costs ate up $100 million in fees that it received from Moscow. Now the last of the 2,000 Fiat engineers who worked on the project are returning to Italy and filling in the details of a story of unending problems. Their narratives should be of interest to U.S. businessmen who are getting overtures to build plants in the Soviet Union...
...broken in January 1967. The country had only a fledgling auto industry at the time, so the plant had to have its own foundries and forges, and turn out its own spare parts and accessories. Its three assembly lines were to produce a single model based on the Fiat 124. But to negotiate Russia's rutted rural roads, the chassis had to be redesigned to ride 1½ inches higher off the ground than the 124. To survive bitter Soviet winters, the car had to start unfailingly at -13° F. "To do all this in the time allowed...
...mount jet aircraft engines on trucks and focus the exhaust on the ground to thaw it, and on newly poured cement to keep it from cracking. In the spring, the construction site became a sea of mud. Hundreds of yards of dikes and runoff canals had to be built. Fiat had to rely on Soviet subcontractors to supply many of the parts it needed in the early stages of production. Tires from the factory of Jaroslav wore out after no more than ten miles of testing. One Italian at the plant estimated that fully half the parts furnished by Soviet...
...that such penalties may no longer be imposed arbitrarily. The right to a hearing now extends to many areas of contact between citizen and officialdom. A man's driving license may not be suspended without a hearing, nor may a soldier's pay be docked by administrative fiat. Environmentalists use due process as one way to block all sorts of construction pending a hearing. A Florida federal court has ruled that no prisoner may be put in solitary without a hearing. Difficult children and the mentally ill are winning the right to dispute efforts to institutionalize them...