Polonez to Panama: Continent-Hopping in a 33-Year-Old, $200 Communist-Era Car 

“Throw in a Lada, and you’ll have a grunge band!” said one internet commenter upon seeing pictures of YouTuber Michał Koziar’s 1991 FSO Polonez parked next to my 1986 Škoda 120. “Grunge” is doubly appropriate, I suppose, because these old cars are correctly perceived as anything but sophisticated, and this unlikely Eastern bloc reunion happened in Seattle, not Silesia. Koziar was even wearing red flannel for what was, ironically, the first stop on a trip aimed at taking in American cars and culture.

Last year, Koziar shipped the Polonez, which he bought in Warsaw for $200, to Cartagena, Colombia, and drove it to Ushuaia, Argentina, along with cameraman Mateusz Strzyzewski. Yes, they flogged a $200, 30-plus-year-old Polonez to Tierra Del Fuego via the Atacama Desert over several months, racking up nearly 25,000 miles of driving in the process. This year, it’s North and Central America’s turn. The pair started in Vancouver, British Columbia, and they’ll eventually store the car in Panama City before doing yet another journey from Panama to New York City in 2025.

As in South America, the plan is to chronicle their Polonez adventures on Koziar’s Polish-language channel, Motobieda, but also to showcase American enthusiasts’ rides and places like the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum in El Segundo, California. He’s rarely asked to showcase his car by people he meets up with, but connecting with a fellow “motoring journalist” posed a unique opportunity. 

He’d learn about how a Škoda 120 got to Seattle and about Škoda’s forgotten U.S. misadventure and film a short segment on it. I’d get to check out the Polonez, a car even rarer in North America than my own. We had to meet up.

What’s a Polonez?

Though largely unknown in the U.S., The FSO Polonez is a staple of Polish motoring even today, 22 years after production ended. FSO built more than a million of them from 1978 to 2003, and when it was new, it was certainly the most contemporary-looking Eastern bloc car, though the angular hatchback body hid dated mechanical pieces. For years, the company’s official line was that Giorgetto Giugiaro had assisted the Poles in designing a mostly home-grown car, and it does resemble Guigaro’s Ace of Spades, Hyundai Pony, and Lancia Delta, but that’s not the real story.

FSO (Fabryka Samochodów Osobowych, literally translation “Passenger Car Factory”) was founded in 1948 and first built the big Warszawa (a licensed Russian GAZ Pobeda) from 1951 and the Polish-designed, VW Beetle-sized Syrena from 1952. By the 1960s, the Warszawa was ancient and like many Eastern bloc firms, FSO looked to Fiat (and Italy’s politically influential Communists) for its next design. What they got was the 1967 Polski-Fiat 125P, which blended the then-new body of the Fiat 125 with the mechanical pieces and interior of that car’s predecessor, the circa-1961 Fiat 1300/1500.

In the early 1970s, Fiat replaced the 125 with the conservative-looking 132 but also began working on a large car to be introduced later in the decade, a big angular hatchback with styling presaged by its early 1970s ESV safety cars. Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, who disliked hatchbacks, reportedly hated the design, so it was abandoned until FSO contracted with Fiat in September of 1974 for help with a new car to potentially replace the aging 125P.

The Polonez effectively recycled the shelved Fiat design and scaled it down to reuse all the mechanical components of the 125P. A young Fiat staffer, Walter de Silva, reportedly worked hand in hand with FSO’s lead designer, Zbigniew Watson, to finish up the car and tailor it to the mechanical components of the 125P. Watson and his staff designed the Polonez’s interior themselves. Since de Silva and Watson adapted the big shape to the 125P’s small-ish existing wheelbase and track, the wheels look narrow and small against the car’s slab sides and sharp angles.

The name, a refrence to the Polish dance Polonaise, came from a reader poll in the state-run Życie Warszawy newspaper, though historian Jerzy Lemański later found evidence that it had been chosen months earlier. That’s how one-party states work.

The result was a very modern looking car in 1978 that still used all of the old bits underneath, including the ancient Fiat-based overhead valve engines and rear leaf springs. These drew instant and often stinging critiques from Western reviewers, as the Polonez drove like a truck, was nowhere near as refined as it looked, and seemed of suspect build quality. But like its 125P predecessor, it was cheap, durable, and big by Euro standards. It quickly found a bargain bin niche and did steady business in France, the Netherlands, and other Western markets, even if critics were unimpressed.

There were even plans to sell it in the U.S., though this never happened. Škoda, who had similar export ambitions, ended up selling cars in Canada from 1983 to 1989. That, I explained to Koziar, is where my car came from. Exports were everything behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s since Eastern bloc Governments needed hard foreign currency to pay down debts and keep their economic engines turning.

FSO kept updating the Polonez, adding engines, refining the styling, and even heavily updating it for the 1990s. It survived Poland’s brush with Martial Law, the fall of Communism, and Daewoo’s ownership of FSO (1995-2000). Ultimately, FSO added pickup, van, wagon, coupe, and sedan variations, and engines from Ford, Peugeot, Rover, and VM.

Adventuring in a $200 Polonez

Koziar, 28, looks like a young Barry Gibb thanks to his long hair and beard. He never really intended YouTube to be as big a part of his life as it’s become, but Polonezes have been almost a constant companion. “I made my first video in 2017 and it was about a Polonez, and things just ballooned from there.” His first car was a Mercedes W124, but his second car, which he bought at 21, was a Polonez. At one point, he owned five of them simultaneously. Reviewing local cars built his channel, and going on drives in Polonezes has made for several epic video series.

He’s down to only two now: a near-mint ‘87 with only 50,000 km on the dial and the 1991 model you see here. 1991 was the last year before FSO gave the car a heavy facelift, so it’s the last of the “original look” models. It’s battered but trusty and, “Since it’s for expeditions, it isn’t stock.”

The expedition car now uses a late 1990s 1.6-liter OHV FSO engine in place of the original 1.5, but Koziar’s fitted with a carburetor that’s easier to repair than the original fuel injection. There’s also a bigger radiator from a Polonez diesel, double electric fuel pumps, rock-hard rear springs to cope with South America’s long stretches of unpaved roads, and—after bumping along Bolivia’s Ruta de las Lagunas—front seats from an Alfa Romeo 156.

“The original seats gradually wore until one of them just broke, and we had plenty of back pain on that trip.” Back-buster Communist-era seats, I empathized, are also a Škoda feature.

“The first adventure in this car was actually Warsaw to Istanbul and back, which,” he pauses, looks at the sky, and laughs, “Was maybe two engines ago. I bought it for 800 Zlotys, which is about $200, and we just went.” He took a different Polonez on a 9,500-km journey to Morocco in 2022, but South America proved a much tougher adventure than anything he’d done before.

“We had 16 different breakdowns along the way. They never stopped us, but they were really annoying, and some of them were down to us preparing the car too late. The engine was swapped over 24 hours before the trip because the original 1.5 died, so there were annoying things like a hose pushing on the distributor cap and fouling the ignition. We kept having fuel problems too, so we tried swapping pumps and filters, but we didn’t realize we’d actually bumped the fuel tank until we got back to Poland.”

Adventuring in South America was much more about the expedition than meeting fellow enthusiasts. “Most of the people interested in classic cars in those countries live in the cities. The countryside is poor, and vehicles are all functional.” The pair did, however, meet up with some people who new Polonezes, including a Chilean Polonez Pickup owner, a Polski-Fiat 125P owner in Peru who’d swapped in a Datsun engine for lack of spares, and a Colombian cabbie who had used one for work in the 1990s. “They were assembled there, the same as Polski Fiat,” shares Koziar. 

Argentina proved to have the largest number of enthusiasts interested in the car, partly because of that country’s long history of classic locally-built Fiats, including the 125. The strangest meeting? In Chile the pair ran into another Polish filmmaker and writer, Arkady Fiedler, driving another Polish classic, a Fiat 126 “Maluch,” northbound towards Colombia.

Are Eastern Bloc cars actually bad?

Koziar was curious to know what an American autowriter thought of the Polonez. After we finished talking about Škodas and South America, we went for a drive. While the Alfa Romeo seats are far superior to the originals and the suspension very firm, the rest of the car isn’t wildly different from a slightly threadbare regular eighties Polonez. Like the Yugo and most other Eastern bloc cars, the Polonez could never win over Western critics and was generally considered crude and poorly made, but is that really the case? And does it matter if it’s fun?

Eastern bloc cars from the 1970s and 1980s, generally products of stagnating economies, were always built down to a rock bottom price. That’s what allowed them to be competitive in Western countries, as they were generally outdated. They all feel exceedingly cheap inside, with materials that can seem decidedly homespun. My Škoda’s dashboard looks like it was built from parts bought at Radio Shack in the 1970s, but the Polonez’s interior pieces don’t really seem worse than a generic early 1980s American econobox (think Dodge Omni or Ford Escort).

“Crude” isn’t quite appropriate for this car, but the Polonez doesn’t drive terribly, even if it isn’t exciting or sophisticated. It understeers, the steering is a little imprecise, it leans, and you could easily hang the tail out if you wanted, but it’s not hard to control. Despite the stiff springs, the ride isn’t awful.

There’s not much power even with the big carb and bigger-than-stock engine. Steep hills mean downshifting into third or even second and revving it hard, but it always gets there. Its limits are low, but it communicates them well, and Michał was not shy about telling me to “push it as hard as you want.”

When people ask me to describe my Škoda’s handling, I often tell them it feels like a lowered VW Beetle or a Renault R8, both rear-engine cars that the 1960s Škoda 1000MB competed with. My 120 is basically a heavily updated version of the 1000MB, so it feels much like a 1960s rear-engine sedan. The Polonez is similar, only with a more conventional layout and less sporty handling. It feels and drives a 1960s Fiat sedan, which is what it really is underneath, or like an early Ford Falcon or Datsun pickup.

Naturally, new car reviewers in the 1980s and 1990s would judge this car harshly, but as a three-decade-old classic, it just feels like a simple, eccentric old car. Its usually more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow, and in this case that’s definitely true.

Originally Michał and Mateusz planned to be in Panama by the end of October, but travel issues delayed their start. They’ve since decided to extend their first U.S. adventure, which was to focus on the West Coast and the trek to North Carolina before turning southwest back to Mexico and Panama. You can follow their journey on social media—it’s in Polish, but the visuals of the car and their experiences along the way are well worth it.