|
|
|
|
|
|
by vbezhenar
2164 days ago
|
|
|
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. |
|
|
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) .