Skoda Garde

The author knew more than thirty-three years ago that the long and, above all, thorny path of development and production of the Favorit passenger car was worth carefully documenting. He had to reject the ideas of that time, he waited and waited! Developing anything new while trying to comply with the extensive tangle of many restrictions and prohibitions resulting from completely meaningless regulations was completely impossible during the years of normalization. Even though the original idea to produce a new type of passenger car within the framework of the Common Market came from the highest party positions. But the design tendencies of world car manufacturers indicated significantly different solutions from the originally intended ones. The gradual development, sometimes even illegal, was taken up by the administrative people in Mladá Boleslav. The amount of work with development and then with the preparation of production was unimaginable, but the people were enthusiastic. The most energy and time was taken up by the battles with the „windmills“ – at that time in the form of the state apparatus. When the Favorit was put into production, the leaders were melting in superlatives. Just like Ing. Andrej Barčák, then director of the PZO Motokov business group: "The Favorit was a groundbreaking project for Škoda. Škoda designed and then produced a car comparable to their European competition under significantly worse conditions. At the beginning, there were just a lot of restrictions, nothing was approved, big risks were taken, but Škoda had no reason to be ashamed of the result."„

Published by Motor Public, hardcover with dust jacket, format 22.5 x 21.5 cm, 118 pages
ISBN 978-80-906693-1-4.