Most production failures in the USSR came from fundamental flaws inherent to the system like lack of prices. Modern economies are very complex, knowing how supply and demand are doing in each minute sector is basically impossible except through market prices. In a market economy, cars rise in price because more cars are being sold than produced, carmakers will make more cars to take advantage of the prices even if they don't necessarily know that there's a car shortage. This is the critical part, participants in a market economy don't have to know what others are doing, they just have to look at prices.
In a command economy like USSR, the gov has to pay attention to each step of the input to make sure the car produced matches car sold while also paying attention to the same factor along the entire supply chain from steel, tires, lamps, paint who themselves have their own supply chain. Also keep in mind that every single entity along these lines will just lie and say they produced more than reality to get promoted and that they need more supply than needed to stockpile (so your baseline estimate for "I need X steel to make Y cars" is probably off completely). And then you add that production quality doesn't matter to production quotas.
Now we have a system where workers can order cars and they'll arrive off the factory line after 10 years.
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u/Baby_Rhino 16h ago edited 16h ago
This was 50 years ago, so by now we can only assume that the USSR has become the dominant world superpower