Junkyard Find: Lada Niva
When I went to Iceland to abuse some Subarus, I managed to visit a couple of Reykjavik junkyards and poke around a bit. In addition to the weird-to-American-eyes French cars and puzzling quantities of 1990s Chrysler products, I found this VAZ-2121 aka Lada Niva 3-door wedged nose-to-tail with a green Megane.
The car’s doors were locked and the yard’s proprietor didn’t speak much English, so I couldn’t determine this Russian’s year of manufacture. The marker lights and some comments by Lada-admiring Icelanders later suggest that this car is from the early 1980s.
There’s no way this car could have competed in the United States market, what with all the cheap Subarus, reliable Toyota Tercel 4WDs, and the perception that Ladas were just Fiats built by enslaved Stakhonovites in dirt-floored tents in the Gulag. Elsewhere, however, the Niva built up a reputation for T-34-grade toughness.
These days, the Niva’s appeal in Iceland has waned, and so this car will likely end up getting crushed soon.
Not many products benefit from association with the Soviet Union. The AK-47 and the Niva, that’s about it.
In Iceland, they’re a little rougher on their Ladas.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I remember driving one of these new in 2007, it looked exactly like this one. The taillights and interior make this a post-1995 model at least, and I think the streering wheel is 1999 or later. Most likely this vehicle is from the 2000s. They are truly awful machines, with subpar reliability in every way. We're talking about major diff and exhaust manifold repairs every 10000 km.
Second place in Paris Dakar 1981 .....http://youtu.be/_kPOzD_jEoI