Mass-Produced Electric Lada from 30 Years Ago
englishrussia.com
englishrussia.com
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.
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.
p.s. im not advocating return to communism lol
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.
Still sad that globalization made 'myopic more' the goal.
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.
[0]: http://www.hondafitjazz.com/manual/A00/HTML/07/SAA2E07A20326...
The body styling would be the only essential to be evaluated after.
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.
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.
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.
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…
My favourite Lada accessories are the rear spoiler for exceptional road holding and carpet on the dash for added luxury.
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.
* 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.
a car that weighs nearly 1000 pounds with an engine that was about as powerful as a riding lawnmower.
reminds me of the old joke...
"what do you call a lada on top of a hill?"
"a miracle."
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.
It seems like a good experiment for the times.
Despite the jokes, the 80s ladas weren't so bad.
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.
First lada, for instance, was not a "soviet" car. It was a product of FIAT. Ural Motorcycle was really a BMW creation etc. etc.
Henry Ford helped build some of the first Soviet cars (starting in 1929). By 1935, the Soviets had produced 100,000 Ford-designed vehicles.
Soviets often "borrowed" western product designs and presented them as miracles of soviet industry.
"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."
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 Lada was quite different[1], in particular it was heavier to cope with Soviet roads.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-first-lada-was-way-more-than-just-a...
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").
My dad got my mum a Lada in the late 80's as it seemed a good deal ... that thing was horrendous and always breaking down.
Another joke from that time "Why do Lada's have heated rear windscreens? To keep your hands warm while you're pushing them"
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.
Came w toolkit, sounds like a gamer's overclocking PC!
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.
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.
> "a miracle."
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.
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.
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.
They were terrible, terrible cars. Even worse than the rear-engined Skodas.
"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."