Lada VAZ-2101

The car that put the Soviet Union’s biggest car factory into business: a licence-built, heavily reworked Fiat 124, tooled up at the purpose-built AvtoVAZ plant in Tolyatti and sold at home as the Zhiguli.^[1] It is catalogued here under the Lada brand because that is how most of the world outside the Eastern Bloc met it, exported to Western Europe from 1971 as the Lada 1200, 1200S and 1300, and to Britain from May 1974, at a price that undercut nearly everything else on sale. There was only one generation; the running changes that followed (the 21011, 21013 and their siblings) are recorded as trims rather than as separate generations, and the car stayed in Soviet production until 1988, six years after Fiat’s own 124 had gone out of production entirely.