Those qualities help explain some of the cars seen on the road in the nation's capital, Pyongyang -- and there aren't too many of them, considering that private citizens cannot officially own automobiles, though some manage to do just that thanks to government connections. First off, there are the Volvo 144s, now mostly used as taxis, 1,000 of which the North Koreans ordered from Sweden but reportedly never paid for. There are also various types of Mercedes from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the Kaengsaeng 88, which is a North Korean-built knockoff of the Mercedes-Benz 190E. Apparently, back when North Korea still had some Russian cash coming in, then-leader Kim Il-Sung demanded the Kaengsaeng to be built in order to show the world they could compete with capitalist South Korea, which had just then started building its own automobiles. By all reports, the car is a pinnacle of bad engineering.

Check out the whole thing here -- it's a worthwhile read. Before you go, we leave you with a video from the article, a long advertisement for a current North Korean car: the Pyeonghwa Motors Whistle. They also have an SUV, a crew-cab pickup and a "luxury" model based on a South Korean car that was itself a knockoff of a Mercedes from the Reagan years. The best part of the video starts around the four-minute mark, where the narrator is obviously talking about the car's features. Look, it has ... a radio! Interior lights! Manually adjustable seats!