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.
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”.
The car for the middle class which replaced “Pobeda” was labelled in the honour of the great Russian river “Volga”. The design of the car was very much identical to the design of Ford Mainline, 1954, purchased by GAZ as a pattern alongside with Chevrolet Belair and Plymouth Savoy. Even before the new car was put into production, the popular Soviet magazine “Ogoniok” awkwardly published pictures of these three cars with an arrogant headline: “New Soviet cars for the middle class”.
Volga
Despite the popularity of Volkswagen around the world their Soviet copy was not really popular among the consumers. To produce another mass car the Soviet government signed the contract with Italian Fiat. The capacity of the factory allowed to produce about five thousands cars per year.
- Italian Fiat 124
At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was ruling the country: he was passionate about cars and racing. In 1965 he got an exclusive American Lincoln Continental sent to USSR right from the Car Exhibition in New York. The car was purchased by the Soviet Ambassador and was built by the company Lehman & Peterson. This had brought stretch limousines into the fashion. Lincoln was sent to ZIL where the engineers made a copy which was sent to production by the anniversary of the Great October Socialistic Revolution in 1967. No doubt, the original Lincoln was much more elegant and graceful than its replica ZIL-114. Nevertheless, the new Soviet limo was not that bad. In early 1970s the car was redesigned, based on another American sample. A Cadillac Fleetwood 75 was turned into a ZIL-115 - to serve the aged and weak-minded Soviet leader.
- ZIL-114
Right up to the collapse of the USSR the Soviet car industry used the same procedure of shameless copying. In order to build “Moskvich-1241", the engineers slightly disfigured Chrysler 1501. Famous “Zhiguli” was copied from Nissan Sunny 1978 although later they were slightly modernized by the engineers of Porsche.
Probably, “Niva” were the only exception – it was made in a way to make people to cry. That car was ‘too-Russian’ to be good.
Source: autopilot.kommersant.ru (in Russian)Popularity: 23%
