Zaz Tavria
How Ukraine’s most popular car of the Nineties came to be
In my previous Saga (Practical Classics, May 2017), I explained how I came to own my Ukrainian ZAZ Tavria. I promised to tell you how it finally lost its ‘problem child’ status. But first, let me say something about its conception back in the USSR of the Seventies and Eighties.
Back in the USSR
The groundwork was done at the giant VAZ (Lada) plant, which produced a small, front-wheel drive prototype in the early Seventies. It looked not unlike a baby Niva, though it preceded its four-wheel drive relative bys ome years. The purpose of the exercise was to learn the practicalities of front wheel drive and, specifically, how to make reliable driveshafts. Five or six years later, the project was shared with the ZAZ factory in Zaporozhiye, Ukraine.
By the end of the Seventies, the whole Soviet motor industry was on a modernisation drive. Lada got the lion’s share of government funding, employing Porsche Design to co-develop the Samara and paying for a number of production licenses from Western component manufacturers. Moskvich, unhappily, had been instructed to throw its charming, Tonka-like hatchback prototypes in a skip and instead reverse-engineer a Chrysler Alpine on a tiny budget – creating the unloved Aleko. Meanwhile in the Urals, the Izh plant, also with modest funds, updated the Moskvich 412 to make the eminently sensible rear wheel drive Orbita/oda hatchback. And ZAZ – well, ZAZ found itself being constantly asked to benchmark its inherited project against every new hatchback released in the West. It found itself punch-drunk in the end and in the Tavria bodyshell, you’ll find random styling references to several of the era’s superminis. In the end, they seem to have just given up and reverse-engineered a VW Polo. The seat frames and steering rack are shameless copies; other components show a family resemblance, let’s say, supplemented by bits nicked from the Samara’s development pile. I’m speculating, of course, but one day I’ll do a ZAZ vs Polo head-to-head comparison.
Surprising originality
But the Tavria wasn’t a complete pastiche. The Melitopol Engine Works developed its own lively, oversquare, belt-driven 1100cc OHC engine with a generous and almost-flat torque curve from 1200rpm upwards. An optional five-speed transmission was offered – with a dog-leg fifth gear of 0.73:1 ratio, and 3.36 final drive. The factory claimed up to 70mpg from this, but it helped if there were no hills in the way. Meanwhile, whomever was in charge of wheel
‘Despite flaky build quality the Tavria had a surprisingly long production run’
and hub development must have been a formidable character, because this otherwise-perfect facsimile of an unobtrusive Eighties hatchback emerged with three-stud detachable wheel rims. The rear hubs are simple: the brake drums boast an enormous flange with the wheel studs pressed in. At the front, things are more creative. The studs are attached to lugs on the outside of centreless brake discs. You did read that correctly… the studs pass through the periphery of a giant hub and the wheel nuts hold disc, hub and rim together. The giant hub is bolted, around its centre, to the bearing housing through which the driveshaft passes. The detachable rims were inherited from the (four-stud) Zaporozhets: perhaps the whole assembly proved more resistant to buckling on Ukraine’s famously-primitive roads than conventional disc wheels.
Finally emerging in 1988, the Tavria – borne of that early Lada experiment to learn about driveshafts – is said to have got its shafts using the design and production expertise of the British firm GKN. It’s a funny old world.
The Tavria, despite its inauspicious origins and decidedly flaky build quality, had a surprisingly long production run. ZAZ partnered up with Daewoo Motors of South Korea in the mid-nineties, who sorted out the factory and brought much-needed marketing expertise. Daewoo started building some of its own models at the factory, then promptly went bankrupt. The Ukrainians – now finally understanding the free market – carried on as if nothing had happened, producing Tavrias plus the next-generation Slavuta – and continuing to stamp out Daewoo models, but now fitted with Tavria engines. The last Tavria pickup-van left the production line around 2011 – one of Ukraine’s few consumer-goods success stories in recent years.
Next time: I finally tell you how my lacklustre Tavria redeemed itself.