Lada 2107 production ends

Our friends at Hooniverse.com passed along some very sad news on Wednesday. AvtoVAZ has stopped producing the Lada 2107, also known as the Lada Riva and the Lada Signet. The last one rolled off the assembly line on Monday.

The 2107 was based on the VAZ-2101 , which was more or less a Soviet-built Fiat 124. Like the Fiat 500, the Volkswagen Beetle and the Ford Model T, the 2101 and the 2107 made car ownership possible for millions who had never dreamed they could afford it. And that isn't the case only in Russia, either. Ladas have been and are sold all over the world.

But the Lada 2101 earned a reputation for shoddiness when it was sold in Western Europe. So today, many Web sites will mark the Lada's passing with jokes about the cars' build quality and reliability.

As someone who had a hand in completely disassembling and rebuilding a Canadian-market 1987 Lada Signet (2107) for the 24 Hours of LeMons, I feel qualified to say that, like many inexpensive cars, the Lada is nowhere near as bad as it has been made out to be. The fact that Ladas came with a sticker reading “Made in the Evil Empire” probably had more to do with their reputation than just about anything else.

It is true that the cars were technologically antiquated by the end of the 1970s, but the hopelessly old-timey technology made them simple and serviceable. Both of those are virtues that today's automakers could stand to become reacquainted with.

Like all cheap cars of the era, the Lada did break down. But the proletarians who gobbled up Ladas as fast as they could be built probably didn't mind the fact that just about anyone could fix the car when it did break.

Having heard people talk about the Lada, I was expecting awful things when my LeMons team started tearing our Lada down. After the “worst car ever built” hype, it was almost disappointing that the car was actually just about average.

The car had been badly neglected, but the materials and build quality on display in our LeMons car were on par with that of Volkswagens of the 1980s. Even a member of our team who is a die-hard General Motors partisan was heard to wonder aloud why the little Lada was held in such poor esteem.

In its first race, the Lada ran continuously for 24 hours and won the top prize, the Index of Effluency. Aside from needing a clutch-cable adjustment and our team's failure to adequately tighten the lugs on one of the wheels, the car was 100 percent reliable. That's a lot more than could be said for the BMWs, Hondas and Toyotas that dropped out of the race with terminal mechanical failures.

And, for the sake of context, let's not forget that while even Carroll Shelby was slapping his name on front-wheel-drive economy cars, the damned Rooskies were still building a car that was capable of ripping proper donuts in the parking lot of Peoples Glorious Universam.

So, for the oft-derided, sewing-machine-powered, rust-prone, tractorlike Lada, I offer a salute. For everything that the Soviets did wrong —and, boy, is it a lot—they were able to slap together a sort-of acceptable Fiat that is not quite as bad as everyone in the world besides me says it is.

By Rory Carroll