Sometimes you can’t help but feel for Soviet car designers and the cars they were working on. It’s true that some completely fine vehicles made it to production during those times, including the Lada Niva and … yeah, the Lada Niva is the only one I can think of.
In any case, some absolutely wild designs have survived, showing that VAZ (Lada) and AZLK (Moskvich) designers really did try to push the envelope, but the envelope was forfeited. The VAZ-2110 (Lada 110) concept featured a Subaru SVX-style glasshouse, the ’70s AZLK-2141 concepts were closer to a Saab than the Talbot Alpine copy that emerged, and the 1986 GAZ Volga 3105 concept had windows that matched the Chevrolet Volt show car 20 years later.
A case in point is the VAZ-X and X2 concepts, dating back to the early 1980s, and visible on the wall in the GAZ-3105 shot above with some really proud-looking Soviet designers. Is that a Tupolev plane in the airbrushed poster, too?
Those were the days of the imaginative minivan, as Renault guided Matra’s groundbreaking and plastic Espace to production, Chrysler made the Voyager, Ford the Aerostar, and later GM its dustbuster Trans Sport and Lumina APV vans. Why not, then, would the Soviet automotive industry also try to create a multi-purpose vehicle of the future?
Lada displayed its first X concept in 1981. It was a swoopy, curvaceous affair with plastic panels and a cowling over a spaceframe structure. Because this was the 1980s Soviet Union, the concept car was nicotine brown, which does not really suit its shape all that well.
Headlights were mounted just beneath the curving windshield, which was cleaned with a single wiper, TGV style. The entire front end seems to consist of a removable cowling.
Surviving sketches show seating as completely configurable in different variations, ranging from a regular front-rear setup to jump seats and turning passenger seats around.
The entire vehicle was less than 14 feet long, the size of a regular hatchback, despite looking larger. Here it is with an early VAZ-2112 mockup, which is the size and shape of a Ford Escort.
The X was followed by a smaller X2 concept a year later. It shared parts of the X’s design, including headlight placement and the single wiper, but it was shorter and smaller as well as finished in blue.
Neither of these vehicles was developed to a drivable stage, and the actual Soviet Russian people carrier of the future turned out to be the 1990s GAZ Gazelle minibus that looks like a Ford Transit knock-off.
These days, AutoVAZ makes decontented front-drive compact Ladas that share parts with old Renaults and Dacias, and their styling harks back to the halcyon days of the second-generation Ford Focus sedan.
The only thing worth remembering is the Lada Niva, one of the least aerodynamic vehicles ever produced there, yet one of the most capable. For what it’s worth, the Niva is still built – as is the Gazelle.
All photos by the respective manufacturers
Top graphic image: Lada
What was Lada’s design brief, take a swoopy minivan and make it look like a potato to honor soviet agriculture?
Great article! It’s impressive that this looks like it could have been a Western concept car from the same era without being a blatant copy of one. And it’s not like wild concepts resembled production cars over here either.
Even if they had built one of these designs, it would have been powered by a poorly rebuilt Soviet tank starter motor.
and you’d wait 12 years for the privilege of buying one!
Everytime I read “Lada”, my brain wants it to be “Lady”.
When you’re with me I’m smiling.
(Now that song is going to be stuck in your head as well! 😉 )
Most people don’t understand that the Soviets made a lot of design studies of aircraft, busses, trolley busses, trucks and cars. Sometimes the design was approved for production once it was simplified if it made sense. But most of the time it was to keep the designers busy working towards a product they would mass produce when they could afford too…
It is disappointing that in the workers paradise they weren’t making more high quality, affordable stuff for those workers to enjoy.
One thing that gets overlooked: Soviet planners at least accounted for an imbalance of supply and demand, plus there was no motivation for planned obsolesce. The products were primitive and ugly, but they were built to last. I remember reading that Soviet-era fridges are still going strong (undoubtedly filled with the most toxic/polluting refrigerant ever made).
The X looks like a first gen Olds Silhouette and a Vector W8 had a baby with the help of Dr Luigi Colani.
The cool thing about the X is if you ever burnt out a headlamp bulb and you had a passenger – you wouldn’t even need to stop to have them change the bulb.
Just direct your passenger to remove a dashpanel and do the swap while underway!