Americans love to take the piss of of the old soviet lada, but as an automotive mechanic I think theyre another example of how the soviets really were ahead of their time.
In 2018 most americans just commute in their cars. performance isnt a real concern, but gas mileage and longevity are. most modern compact cars are hardly capable of doing more than merging onto the interstate. And forget about trying to repair them yourself (the Honda Fit requires you to drop the engine to service the plastic fuel filter.)
but the lada could be serviced with a set of rented hand tools and in most cases had ample ground clearance to work without stands. you could rebuild the electric starter with a spool of wire and a few parts from an electronics store. it was never going to beat an american muscle car in the quarter mile, but the lada 1200 made 23 miles per gallon. the 1972 chevy nova of the same era? 14 miles per gallon.
It’s great to romanticize them, but this really was a low quality product that constantly broke down. Make no mistake, this was not a good product, even if it was cheap to repair.
Actually problem was in a very bad quality control (same as with infamous Yugo later). So some were working fine, and some were delivered with screws missing and stuff like that. Overall, yes, it was not a good product - but when you get your lada and invest some time/money into fixing all the initial problems it would work and it was very hardy and able to work in tough conditions (winter, mud, bad roads, etc.). It was peoples' car, a product of a different era and different viewpoint. Very basic, not luxurious in any way, but affordable, and ultimately it would get you from point A to point B. If it didn't, parts were cheap and you didn't need any special skills or tools to fix it, so maintenance was fairly easy. My uncle owned one for around 20 years, and that car survived a lot more than any modern passenger car could take (among the other things you could put crazy amount of load in it without breaking the axle, he transported construction material in it like it was a truck).
I know, I'm from Yugoslavia originally. All Eastern Europe cars had the same problem, the lack of quality control, unmotivated workforce, and corruption which resulted in big oscillations in quality between the same models of cars...
Anecdote for sure, but we had a Niva on the farm I grew up on that basically lived it's whole life in a paddock, and even though the car needed to be roll-started when you wanted to use it (because the battery was the same vintage as the car) it was incredibly reliable.
The only repeat issue I've really seen with the old Nivas was rust as they allegedly spent months on snow-covered docks in Russia before being exported overseas, which ended up with them "coming with rust from the dealership".
I'm sure, however, that a professional day-to-day mechanic would have a different perspective on their reliability of course.
From what I heard Nivas that were exported from the Soviet Union went through more rigorious QA and were of a better quality than those released to the domestic market.
This was common practice in eastern block countries. They could not compete in western markets otherwise, even if the product was lower priced.
My only problem with the Niva is the fuel consumption, 19.6 mpg. Not something you'd want if you live in the EU. Otherwise it seems to be a quite reliable and repairable car. Also works with lower grade gasoline found in ex-soviet states.
Perhaps it's survivor bias, but every summer when I visit the in-laws in Ukraine I still see plenty of Ladas on the roads. And many rural roads in Ukraine are hideously bad with deep potholes.
My favourite Lada accessories are the rear spoiler for exceptional road holding and carpet on the dash for added luxury.
Probably depends on what year you’re looking at. The Lada Riva started its life as a fiat 124 in 1979 and stopped production in 2010 or so. Those are some very tired tools, and I can imagine that the tolerances got much looser with time.
Compared to other Eastern European cars the Lada was very solid IMHO. My dad went through a number of pre-owned cars, an old 'round' Wolga, Polski Fiat (very similar to the Lada, since it was also a licensed Fiat), an East German Wartburg, and the Lada was his favourite, the engine was basically indestructible). IFIR the only problem was that the bodywork was suspectible to rusting, but what's a few holes here and there if the car is just driving fine ;)
In 1976, VW started to make Golfs here Yugoslavia, in Sarajevo. Compared to other Eastern European cars like Yugo or Lada, VW golfs were solid. I still see many old Golfs on the roads here in Montenegro, and very few Yugo’s.
Interesting, did they also sell the Golfs in Yugoslavia? I know that at one point, Eastern Germany imported a few VW Golf, Mazdas and Citroens, but AFAIK those were one-time deals, and nearly unobtainable for normal citizens (both because they were rare, and also very expensive, even the Lada was almost considered to be a luxury car in the GDR).
Yes they did. It was also possible to buy e.g. an imported Mercedes, if you could afford one.
Yugoslavia is Eastern Europe but was neither NATO nor Eastern Block. The country stayed neutral, and they traded with both sides of the iron curtain. E.g. Americans have built a nuclear plant, Russians sold some military tech for e.g. submarines…
That was fun to read. Especially as a 'unfortunate' owner of several Ladas (Zhigulis to be precise).
It wasn't so easy servicable, 23 miles per gallon can be achieved only with best petrol (good luck finding that in USSR) and overall quality was suffering from a number of things: quality of spare parts, drunkennes of conveyor worker, altering of main design to make it cheaper...
And besides, _soviets_ per se wasn't ahead of time, since Lada/Zhiguli was produced on Italian factory bought completely from FIAT.
So if you want to praise engineers - praise Italians first.
Lada 2101's aren't the same as Fiat 124. Russians bought the designs and rights to manufacture and changed them significantly enough.
* Fiat used either OHV or DOHC, Lada used SOHC
* Fiat had rear disk brakes, Lada had drums
* Lada suspension was raised and reinforced to better deal with bad roads
* Lada suspension was also dumbed down. IIRC Lada did not use trailing upper arms
There are more than 800 differences between these two cars. I am not saying that Italians shouldn't be praised, but in reality the Lada is a completely different car.
Each culture has its own design goal. Watch Jay Leno talk about French Citroen DS. I loved that an American guy could step outside the mainstream and see how something weird could actually feel good.
Still sad that globalization made 'myopic more' the goal.
The Citroën DS is one of my favourite cars of all time. In fact, Citroën has a soft spot in my heart as a manufacturer (due to the DS, the 2cv, success in rallying, among other things).
Russians were "hungry" and they had to work with what little they had. Their western counterparts were "well fed" and "lazy" in comparison. There was no need to be inventive and creative at every step of the process.
Its a funny balance. Throwing money alone at a problem often does not work - you need to have "hungry" people as well.
> Their western counterparts were "well fed" and "lazy" in comparison. There was no need to be inventive and creative at every step of the process.
That doesn't seem entirely fair. The western counterparts could never have sold this car, any more than the Soviet engineers could have sold the Chevy. They weren't being fat and lazy, they were just designing for their target market.
The cheapest cars such as the Nissan Versa or Mitsubishi Mirage don't sell particularly well in the US. Only the most desperate consumers are willing to drive around in penalty boxes.
From a distance perhaps. Up close the build quality isn't great. And riding in them for more than a few minutes is rather unpleasant, at least compared to a decent car like a Honda Civic or something. The cheapest cars really skimp on noise insulation, seat supports, and suspension damping to hit those price points.
I agree on most point but why would more damping could increase costs? Apart from the fact that one can increase ground clearance and soften the spring, thus resulting in stronger damping, the cheap gas monotube suspension price isn't really sensitive on the damping force required for normal applications
They were easy to steal as well, most of the time. My parents owned a Lada, there was an attempt to steal it by a group of thieves that specialized in Lada's. They didn't succeed with our car, we found it half a mile down the road with radio on, lights blinking, wipers on and doors open. It had a switch to choose between LPG and gasoline, which had gotten stuck in the middle.
> (the Honda Fit requires you to drop the engine to service the plastic fuel filter.)
Sure, but when do you do that? Honda says you can do it once per 100,000km (and you don't really need to do it until your fuel pressure indicator brings it up, I would think).
Far as I can tell, Honda's service intervals are very long (at least for Accord/Civic, maybe the Fit/Jazz is different), failure rates are very low.
edit: Also, not sure you're supposed to access the fuel filter in a Honda Fit by dropping the engine (!). The service manual[0] seems to say that you access it by removing the center console.
My dad had a second-hand one in the 90s (almost certainly from mid 80s) and it was a pretty solid car. There was a degree of simplicity to the maintenance that was uncharacteristic of other cars at the time. I don't recall it needing any major work doing to it at any point.
It also had windscreen wipers on the headlights which I recall a strange fascination with because at night the blades would cast moving shadows across the road.
When he sold it, it was snapped up quick for the Russian market.
However, the power of the electric lada in the article does sound more worthy of the old jokes.
It still seems pretty ambitious for the day and certainly surpasses my expectations on range.
I never knew if the jokes were just cold war propaganda or entrenched in some kind of reality. The design of the Lada definitely went back some way. But for his needs it wasn't a bad car.
My dad tinkered with cars and did everything himself. Maybe from a consumer point of view the car wasn't great, but then judging by the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that came with the car it perhaps wasn't aimed at the average consumer.
I have since heard from other sources that the electrics could vary between perfect and terrible in Ladas, and that the bodies could be prone to rust. But both things were not uncommon with more mainstream cars of the time. I think the main problem my dad had was getting hold of parts in the UK.
> Another joke from that time "Why do Lada's have heated rear windscreens? To keep your hands warm while you're pushing them"
I remember many of those jokes being interchangeable with Lada and Skoda. Incidentally, my dad's next car was a Skoda Favorit. I'm not sure the jokes were really relevant there.
It is quite interesting how Skoda now enjoys one of the better reputations of brands under the VW group.
It does sound a bit strange when I hear people comparing the reliability of cars driven in conditions that are literally and figuratively worlds apart. And I'm thinking of climate, quality of roads, availability of professional repair, etc.
Since very few Ladas were ever driven in California, and very few Chevys in Russia it's hard to be fair. They are both the products of local conditions.
Skoda enjoys a good reputation because you're getting VW build quality for less than a VW or Audi. Their use of common platforms and drive-train technology helps with this.
Ural was not a BMW. It was a Russian product based off an (old) BMW design. There’s a difference. Construction and materials don’t naturally follow just because they liscensed a design.
Russians acquired the design and production techniques for BMW motorcycles and sidecars from Germans. Basically german tech reproduced in russia.
"According to official accounts, after lengthy discussion, the BMW R71 motorcycle was found to closely match the Red Army's requirements. Five units were covertly purchased through Swedish intermediaries. Soviet engineers in Moscow dismantled the five BMWs, reverse engineered the BMW design in every detail and made molds and dies to produce engines and gearboxes in Moscow."
Fiat that the USSR bought wasnm't exactly a pinnacle of automotive engineering to begin with (as an American joke goes, FIAT stands for "Fix it again, Tony", doesn't it?)
Initially, while all the Italian equipment was operating within design tolerances, Italian expendables were used, and designs weren't tweaked, it wasn't terrible for what it was. But that did not last long, and quality went downhill.
To add insult to injury, Lada (or strictly speaking Zhiguli, Lada was the export name, and those were built slightly better) was a highest-end car a normal person could buy (after waiting in line for a few years, of course) without being "somebody".
The Fiat 124 won care of the year in 1967. Although like most Italian cars of the era they didn't like the salted roads and damp air of Northern Europe.
The Lada was quite different[1], in particular it was heavier to cope with Soviet roads.
Yeah, I survived 33 years in Russia and have no idea what russian cars are, lol.
I know all of that stories about FIAT. There's even anecdotes in Russia about the fact that they can't even copy Fiat without making a bucket with screw-nuts instead of a car.
Name of the factory where Lada is being produced: VAZ, locals call this car TAZ ("pelvis").
Well, Li-Ion was mass adopted way after the fall of the USSR, so back then Ni-XX is all they had. The Ford Endura Diesel engines provided ~60 HP, but were more than good enough for everyday use.
If they kept up with it, electric may have been quite standard by now. Of course, the US had electric cars almost a century before,which were abandoned, as well. And electric batteries are still nowhere near petrol by energy density.
Heh. My driving instructor who enjoyed soviet cars told us of a trick to get cars like that up the hill - turn around and go back up the hill using the reverse gear.
My dad owned a late 60s Ford Cortina, 1600cc push rod engine, which probably made 100hp on a good day. If you look at it's 1959 predecessor it was about 1000cc and made 39hp.
That Cortina also was a POS.
'Some' 1950's and 1960's American cars weren't POS. Everything else was. I don't think until the Japanese automakers efforts at world domination in the 1970's did you see high quality reliable ordinary cars.
Volvo was always damn reliable from 1950-s on through 1991 as long you as you changed oil, or at least topped it up regularly. Can't kill it, there's almost nothing to go wrong with it. Same basic engine design for 40 years. (B18, B21.)
> So in the years 1980-81, the first serial Soviet electric car was produced – over fifty cars were made in that first production run.
Does 50 cars produced over a 2 year period really qualify as "mass-produced"? When Tesla makes a few thousand Model 3 cars in a single week, analysts complain it's not enough.
Back in the old days my dad built his Lada himself.
We could not really afford a new one, so he bought and collected parts including the chassis. Then, I think it took half an year or so between his job to assemble it together. With lots of help of course, from my uncle and several books describing the technical details. As a kid, I had minor contributions as well and learned a thing or two about cars in the process.
How reliable was the car? Pretty reliable. He drove it for half a decade, at least. At its end, we used the car mainly for pulling a trailer with construction work materials for several years then sold it for scrap.
Yeah, you could build a Lada yourself, if you really wanted to.
There was a time back in the late 70's and early 80's when the USSR bought New Zealand dairy and agricultural produce but couldn't pay the bill. So they paid with Ladas instead.
They were terrible, terrible cars. Even worse than the rear-engined Skodas.
But Porsche was even more ahead of it's time with the first hybrid car in 1900:
"The Lohner-Porsche's design was studied by Boeing and NASA to create the Apollo program's Lunar Roving Vehicle. Many of its design principles were mirrored in the Rover's design."
In 2018 most americans just commute in their cars. performance isnt a real concern, but gas mileage and longevity are. most modern compact cars are hardly capable of doing more than merging onto the interstate. And forget about trying to repair them yourself (the Honda Fit requires you to drop the engine to service the plastic fuel filter.)
but the lada could be serviced with a set of rented hand tools and in most cases had ample ground clearance to work without stands. you could rebuild the electric starter with a spool of wire and a few parts from an electronics store. it was never going to beat an american muscle car in the quarter mile, but the lada 1200 made 23 miles per gallon. the 1972 chevy nova of the same era? 14 miles per gallon.