Tag Archives: lada

Are You Deathproof? Then Listen Up!

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07 thumb 500x373 Are You Deathproof? Then Listen Up!

Let those peo­ple cross: respect the pedestrians

As the Soviet Union could pos­si­bly be named the coun­try of pro­pa­ganda, this array of fun edu­ca­tional posters only sup­ports this notion — albeit this time in quite a pos­i­tive sense. A Ukrain­ian author­ship of the road rules and safety in a funky and engag­ing man­ner teaches dri­vers to give way to pedes­tri­ans, respect the zero tol­er­ance limit, reminds of the school zone rules as well as the neces­sity to get the car checked reg­u­larly. Pos­si­bly kitschy, but it does get the mes­sage across. Enjoy!

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 3 of 3

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A good exam­ple of how the ideas to make a new car were born is the story of the fac­tory “Com­mu­nar”. The Min­is­ter of Car Man­u­fac­tur­ing made a call to the fac­tory where design­ers thought over the scheme of a new Ukrain­ian car and lit­er­ally said: “I heard you were going to make a spring sus­pen­sion from the “Volk­swa­gen” but I actu­ally like the Ital­ian Fiat-600”. Shortly the fac­tory com­menced the pro­duc­tion of ZAZ-965 –nearly the exact copy of the Fiat.

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ZAZ-965

By the way, the next model of ZAZ was the replica of Ger­man NSU Prinz 4. This car was remem­bered by the nick­names “Soap Box” and “Big-eared”.

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 2 of 3

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In early 1930s with­out any licens­ing arrange­ments the Soviet engi­neers copied the first lim­ou­sine car  for the Com­mu­nist party exec­u­tives. In 1932 six lim­ou­sines were copied off the Amer­i­can Buick 90L. How­ever,  later the fac­tory pro­duc­tion line was switched to pro­duc­ing cater­pil­lar tractors,so the lim­ou­sine busi­ness was shifted to Moscow Stalin Factory.

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ZIS-101

The car, based on the engine of the Buick and the body copied off the Cadil­lac, was given another non-poetic name, ZIS — 101.  It also had Buick radi­a­tor bars.

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 1 of 3

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Once some music com­poser said  that “There are only seven notes which com­pose all the music in the world.  No wod­ner some songs sound alike”.  Undoubt­edly,  all cars  have got four wheels, so pla­gia­rism in the auto­mo­bile indus­try is hard to pinch.  In this arti­cle we delib­er­ately ignore a pop­u­lar Soviet point of view that a steam loco­mo­tive, an air­plane and the radio were not invented in Rus­sia.  All we attempt here is to make a small digres­sion into the his­tory of Soviet auto­mo­bile indus­try in order to iden­tify its ori­gins and its development.

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ZIS-110

A Russ­ian  philoso­pher Vasiliy Rosanov once noted that in Rus­sia every sin­gle case of wealth orig­i­nates from theft or extor­tion.  His­tor­i­cally, the econ­omy of the Russ­ian Empire before the 1917 was so deeply inte­grated into the Euro­pean econ­omy that the exchange of ideas, some­thing, which now would have been hugely copy­righted, was very com­mon.  Like, in 1901 in St Peters­burg the car­riage fac­tory Freze and the Riga bicy­cle fac­tory Leit­ner suc­cess­fully assem­bled the French oil engines De Dion Buton as part of Russ­ian car­riages. Another fac­tory Aksai in Rostov-on-Don pur­chased the license for the pro­duc­tion of the Amer­i­can Oldsmo­bile Carved Dash.  In 1906 a Russ­ian engi­neer Boris Lut­skoy organ­ised the assem­bling of  Mer­cedes cars for the Russ­ian mar­ket. At last, the main pride of Rus­sia – the auto­mo­bile Russo-Balt — was made from for­eign parts – the chas­sis with four-cylinder engine was adopted from a Bel­gian com­pany with a Swiss name Fondu.

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Soviet Automobile Industry — Part 2 of 2

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zpj1 500x419 Soviet Automobile Industry Part 2 of 2

Zaporozhets, ZAZ 968A

In 1960 the con­struc­tion of a huge car plant in Ukraine was fin­ished and the new car “Zaporozhec” ZAZ-965 (later nick­named “Hump­backed”) was offered for sale. In terms of design, it was a unique car despite the numer­ous talks that it was just a replica of Volk­swa­gen “Bee­tle” and Fiat “Topolino”. This car had a hard roof (unlike Fiat) and an air-cooled engine (unlike “Bee­tle”). This small inex­pen­sive car rapidly gained high pop­u­lar­ity with peo­ple not only in the USSR but also abroad.

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Soviet Automobile Industry — Part 1 of 2

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Let us start with some sad news. Objec­tively, the auto­mo­bile indus­try in mod­ern Rus­sia is way behind the rest of the world, with a 10 to 15 year progress gap.  Lag­ging behind in tech­nol­ogy, low and incon­sis­tent qual­ity of parts and assem­bling are the actual prob­lems of all car plants in Rus­sia. But was it all the same back in the Soviet times? Today we are going to try and answer this question.

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Lada 1300/1.2 or VAZ 2101

Back in remote 1945, the year of the Vic­tory in Sec­ond World War, just one day before the Tri­umph Parade in Moscow the team of Soviet engi­neers intro­duced new model M-20 “Pobeda” (eng.: Vic­tory) to Stalin. Stalin was dis­sat­is­fied. “That is def­i­nitely not our best victory”, — he said with a frown. Nev­er­the­less in the fall of 1945 the car mass pro­duc­tion commenced.

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