The City Where Every Car Is the Same Car

The first thing you notice in Tashkent isn't the architecture. It's the traffic — a sea of white Chevrolets, or the fountains at Magic City, where someone built a sixty-meter fairytale castle and decided the appropriate response was a nightly laser-and-pop-music water ballet. I stood at the front, let it mist my face, and thought: this is either magic or a mid-budget cruise ship. Possibly both.

White Cobalts, Nexias, and tiny Spark hatchbacks fill the streets. For a moment, it feels like the whole city agreed on one car — which, as it turns out, it basically did. Nine out of ten cars here are Chevrolets, and at the peak of the arrangement, 94 percent of every new car sold in the country came from the same factory. Somewhere in the Fergana Valley there's a man whose entire job is deciding what shade of white to paint everything with wheels.

The backstory: a joint venture with South Korea's Daewoo in the '90s, quietly absorbed into General Motors, then nationalized by the government in 2019 and renamed UzAuto Motors — which now floats on its own stock exchange and still can't be bothered to offer red.

The white makes sense once the sun comes out. It reflects heat, hides dust, and apparently exempts you from having an opinion about cars.

Down near the TV Tower, the plov center Besh Qozon runs the same logic in food form — cauldrons the size of hot tubs, each one capable of feeding a thousand people off a single batch, serving something like three thousand diners before the day's over. Nobody there is going for subtlety either. Subtlety, it seems, lost its visa at the airport.

Walking through the city, I started seeing it everywhere: the white sedans, the Soviet apartment blocks, the giant cauldrons, all of it running on the same principle — go big, go uniform, and let the tourists sort out the metaphor.