Syrena 1956-1983 - Popular movement in the form of a pontoon body
Summary
There were around 10,000 car brands and designers - most of them have disappeared. One of these vanished brands is Syrena. Between 1956 and 1983, vehicles were produced almost exclusively for the Eastern market. Nevertheless, more than 500,000 vehicles with a modern pontoon body left the factory.
Estimated reading time: 3min
Preview (beginning of the article)
The Syrena crawled laboriously up the hill near Krakow. The three of us were sitting in this small car with our luggage, and the proud owner was now doing something that we had previously only observed in elderly classic car drivers: He swayed his upper body back and forth to the rhythm of the rising and falling sound of the engine, as if he were standing in front of the Wailing Wall. In this way, he entered into a soulful symbiosis with the two-stroke engine grumbling tormentedly in third gear. You hardly ever saw a Syrena in the West. It was themost"Polish" of the three brands produced by the state-owned Fabryka Samochodow Osobowych (FSO) in Warsaw. This was because the Warszawa was derived from the Russian Pobjeda, and the Polski Fiat betrayed its origins even without a name. The Syrena in-house development presented for the first time at the Poznan motor show in 1955 appealed with its modern pontoon body. This rested on a box frame chassis with upper transverse leaf springs. A 744 cc two-cylinder two-stroke engine with a modest 27 hp (later also 30 hp) drove the front wheels.
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