Sam Glover
Sam spies on the Ukrainian automotive industry
What’s Sam’s ideal holiday? A tour of a Ukrainian car factory. Obviously.
Beach holidays have never appealed. When Ed Hughes, Julian Nowill and I found ourselves in Odessa, Ukraine, with a few days to kill, we quickly bored of sun, sand, sea and mafia-types in Speedos. A more stimulating holiday activity was needed. We decided to hire a car and investigate the state of the Ukrainian automotive industry. We mounted a flesh-red Dacia Sandero Stepway at Odessa airport. It was a rather undignified conveyance for three grown men, but it was functionally adequate and borderline likeable. We followed the south bank of the huge Dnieper river to Zaporizhia – a beautiful route through the Ukrainian equivalent of ‘duelling banjos’ territory.
Zaporizhia is Ukraine’s Detroit, and it’s showing similar signs of fraying at the edges. The north end of the city is a Stalinist utopia, crowned by beautiful Twenties hydroelectric dam. The newer south end is centred around the Zaporizhia Automobile Factory (ZAZ).
The air-cooled Zaporozhets models ZAZ produced from 1960 to 1994 provided bottom-rung four-wheeled transport for the Soviet masses. The Tavria and its spin-offs built from 1989 to 2011 gave Ukraine mobility in its first decade of independence. ZAZ started assembling complete knockdown Daewoo models in 1998, then built them entirely in-house from 2005 using tooling from the moribund Daewoo-fso plant in Poland and adapted Tavria engines. Various CKD Chinese models have since joined the range.
We marched into the head office and announced that we were a delegation of motoring journalists, offering a copy of Practical Classics as proof. To our surprise, we were soon sitting face-to-face with the chairman of the board, Mr Yevdokimenko.
‘This is a difficult time for car production in Ukraine,’ he explained. ‘We have the capacity to build 300,000 a year – but at present we’re only achieving 20 percent of this. Russia was our biggest market, but the Crimean conflict put a stop to this. Also, easier trade with Europe means that secondhand cars are flooding the home market.’ A Tavria-engined Lanos might be a bargain at less than £5000, but it’s now competing with secondhand Volkswagens from Poland. A factory tour revealed the facilities to be unexpectedly modern. Some of the house-sized presses may still have had ‘MOSCOW USSR’ proudly emblazoned across their turrets, but production was swift and ingeniously automated. The quality of the finished bodies was almost inappropriately high.
KRAZ and Bogdan
We resaddled the Sandero and followed the Dnieper to Kremenchuk – home of KRAZ. KRAZ has built large trucks of an apocalypse-proof Mad Max variety since 1959. Entering the factory was impossible without a military permit, but the accommodating marketing department assembled 15 trucks – mostly military – outside the factory gates for our inspection. We learned that the collapse of trade with Russia had destroyed KRAZ’S supply of YAMZ diesel engines and its main export market, but that the company was rallying with a larger range of terrifying-looking military vehicles. A steady flow of factory-fresh unregistered trucks rumbling around the city signalled that production was ongoing.
Our final stop was Bogdan in the city of Cherkasy, producer of licence-built Lada 110s and various Hyundai models. The head office was closed – which was reasonable as it was a Saturday – but the rest of the plant was also suspiciously peaceful, leading us to suspect that it’d lapsed into dormancy.
At the end of our holiday, we concluded that the Ukrainian automotive industry is down – but it's not yet out. In the optimistic words of Mr Yevdokimenko at ZAZ: ‘We’re going to have to make some changes to our business – but we’ll work it out somehow.’
‘We found ourselves sitting face-to-face with the chairman of the board’