It is very hard or impossible to come to a car store to buy a car and go back with that car home in one day. You must first make an order and wait for months(usually 4-6) while your car be ready.
Moreover, if you want to buy a car from foreign manufacturers (Mersedes-Benz, BMW, Toyota, etc) you have to pay 2X of its original price.
Some said it was because it is better at keeping the cars cool, but this doesn't explain why surrounding Kazakhstan/Tajikistan/etc had different color cars.
The best explanation I heard was the president liked white cars, so only allowed white cars to get made. This seems most plausible to me, and seems like similar things happened in Turkmenistan: https://www.motor1.com/news/226932/turkmenistan-president-ba...
But usually when my friends wanted to buy a car, they chose the white color by the following criteria: it does not heat much like other colors on the sun. If we take into account that there are not much parking lots and garages with a roof, white colored car is the best choice.
BTW: "shapka" or "шапка" (from Russian) is translated to English as a "hat" or "cap". That means, when you buy a thing, you need to also pay for its hat too.
Funny, in Norway it's more like 3X.
In the end I limped to Kazakhstan, got the bike hastily fixed and rode back to Germany. 20000 km later it's mostly fixed and it runs fine. Most importantly, I didn't get hurt.
I'm living in Kazakhstan and we have foreign import tax and "localized builds" (very minimal work is done). But actually we're in economic union with Russia, so most of new cars are built in Russia and imported without much taxes. So it's not that bad here. AFAIK Uzbekistan recently joined EAEU, so, I guess, situation should improve over few years.
yes and no. Significant share (seems most) of major USSR car manufacturers started as a transfer of technology deal and improvement on its own has been pretty small and incremental since then. VAZ - Fiat (196x), GAZ - Ford (193x), AZLK/Moskvich was "refreshed" by the complete factory transfer of the Opel's one right after the WWII, ZIL - original 1917 and total re-equipment in 193x - to build Italian and American cars under license (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZiL#History), UAZ models naturally trace back to the GAZ, and its most known and widely used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ-469 - hasn't changed much in 50 years. KAMAZ though doesn't look like an outright transfer and is kind of local success story, yet also not much improvements in 50 years (probably for the same reason of absence of any real competition as the USSR planned economy basically segmented manufacturers into their own quasi-monopoly segments) .
I'm sure parent comment knows this, but context for others.
Manufacturing is so efficient these days that you can't really afford to have local manufacturing. There's no vehicle assembly in Australia, for instance. There's much less in Britain. There used to be vehicle assembly plants in almost every state in the US, not so many now.