[trhway]

This is final assembly only, an absolute minimum required by law to qualify out of heavily tariffed foreign made car category (the countries of former USSR, except for Baltic ones, like to highly tax foreign import in order to supposedly protect "domestic manufacturer" - as result nobody has good car building industry). There have been several such Daewoo/Chevrolet plants across the former USSR. Russia for example also builds Ford and BMW that way. For example back in mid-199x Elabuga (city in Russia) Chevrolet Blazer factory had extremely sweet conditions on the Chevrolet Blazers to be assembled there - basically attach the bumpers and some other details - it took 1 hour for 3 workers per car.

[vbezhenar]

Russia used to have few car manufacturers and produced almost every car part rather than importing it. After USSR collapse those cars were not very competitive, especially with used cars from Japan and Europe, unfortunately, so those factories either died or optimized (like VAZ which is part of Renault-Nissan now and is moving to just build western Renault designs rather than develop and improve their LADA cars). That's quite tragic situation, plenty of people are losing jobs, country is losing an expertise.

I'm living in Kazakhstan and we have foreign import tax and "localized builds" (very minimal work is done). But actually we're in economic union with Russia, so most of new cars are built in Russia and imported without much taxes. So it's not that bad here. AFAIK Uzbekistan recently joined EAEU, so, I guess, situation should improve over few years.

[trhway]

>Russia used to have few car manufacturers and produced almost every car part rather than importing it.

yes and no. Significant share (seems most) of major USSR car manufacturers started as a transfer of technology deal and improvement on its own has been pretty small and incremental since then. VAZ - Fiat (196x), GAZ - Ford (193x), AZLK/Moskvich was "refreshed" by the complete factory transfer of the Opel's one right after the WWII, ZIL - original 1917 and total re-equipment in 193x - to build Italian and American cars under license (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZiL#History), UAZ models naturally trace back to the GAZ, and its most known and widely used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ-469 - hasn't changed much in 50 years. KAMAZ though doesn't look like an outright transfer and is kind of local success story, yet also not much improvements in 50 years (probably for the same reason of absence of any real competition as the USSR planned economy basically segmented manufacturers into their own quasi-monopoly segments) .

[SomeoneFromCA]

Older Kamaz trucks however, looks precisely like Scania trucks, to the point I could not believe my own eyes when I saw one.

[csours]

The generic term for this is SKD/CKD Semi knock down/Complete knock down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock-down_kit

I'm sure parent comment knows this, but context for others.

Manufacturing is so efficient these days that you can't really afford to have local manufacturing. There's no vehicle assembly in Australia, for instance. There's much less in Britain. There used to be vehicle assembly plants in almost every state in the US, not so many now.