The Lada is about to wipe the smile off your face. GM, the world's biggest carmaker, is backing new lines from the Russian company. Brian Byrne reports
I was switching on the engine when I realised that those Lada jokes might be true after all. It was raining outside. Then it was raining inside, as the water dripped through the roof of the Riva estate.
It's the kind of thing that can happen if you use self-tapping screws to attach the luggage rail to the roof. Add to that problem, something less than indifferent brakes, and I left the car parked outside the office all through the long weekend. With a towel on the driver's seat!
It wasn't long after that Lada bailed out of Ireland. And many of us might be forgiven for thinking the brand had disappeared altogether, as apparently have most of the Ladas sold in Ireland. But it hasn't.
Not only is the company still making more than 750,000 cars a year in Russia - and exporting some 85,000 - but it's poised for a new era of enterprise in a joint venture with General Motors. Indeed, the first few hundred units of a new Chevrolet Niva SUV have just rolled off the Togliatti production line in southern Russia.
Some 35,000 of the joint venture vehicles - the result of a $332 million investment - will be produced there next year. And GM says two more models are likely to get into production, one of them next year probably based on the current Opel Astra.
It's all a long way from 1970 when the first cars came down the line in a new factory built with Fiat expertise and using technology and pressings originally developed by the Italian company for its 124 model.
The cars, for Russian customers, were called Zhiguli after the mountain range near the city that was later to become known as "Russia's Detroit". Officially it was called the VAZ 2101. It was subsequently declared the "Russian Car of the Century".
The names of Lada, Samara, Oka and Niva were eventually to become familiar in some 37 countries. Of the 20 million units which have been produced since then, 12 million are still believed to be on the road, two thirds of them in Russia itself.
Currently AutoVAZ, the name of the holding company, has markets which stretch as far as every country in south and central America, most European and several Nordic countries, and Egypt where cars are assembled from CKD kits.
The first Niva 4WD vehicle was produced in 1977, and has changed little since, though a 5-door version came along in 1994. The Fiat 125-based 2107 was added in 1983, and a series of buggy-type vehicles, eventually named MARSH, went into production in 1989. By the end of 1990, AutoVAZ had produced its 13-millionth car.
The first locally-designed fuel injection systems were installed in the company's vehicles in 1994. By the mid-1990s, AutoVAZ was moving on to a new shape from the old Fiat mainstays, and when the total production reached 17 million vehicles in 1997, the jubilee car was a Lada 110 saloon, reminiscent in style to the old Talbot Solara or the Renault 20. It's essentially the same car that is the main product today, in 111 or estate, and 112 or hatchback forms along with the saloon.
They're powered by 8v or 16v variants of a 1.5-litre petrol engine, while the current Niva has 1.7-litre units. The 10-series cars sell from €7,759 in France, while the Niva starts at €9,259. They're all cheap, and, God bless them, they look cheap inside.
AutoVAZ has a proving facility at Togliatti which includes Russia's only wind-tunnel for automobile testing, and a high-speed circuit was commissioned there last year. International manufacturers, including Fiat, have been using the facility.
A new range of AvtoVAZ-designed cars, named Calina, are almost finished their testing programme. The new Chevrolet Niva is also to be exported to Europe, probably under the Opel brand.
At the recent Paris Motor Show, we saw concepts of a Fiat Punto-sized 4-seater, the Carat and a 2-litre targa-roofed hardtop roadster.
SO far, the story reads like a happy enough fairytale. Truth is, the Lada product line - apart from the Niva which has always been a very competent offroader - never managed to catch up to the modern world. Its success has largely been in less-developed markets where owners were less concerned with technology and simply wanted cheap and simple carware.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, like many other inefficient and ageing industries in its native land, AutoVAZ was seriously sick, to the point of bankruptcy.
But with a little help from its GM friends, AutoVAZ/Lada may well be able to leap from the 1970s to the present-day in much shorter order than anyone could have expected. And the roofs are unlikely to leak.