Lada: The Soviet Car That Outsold Honda

In October 1974, a convoy of Soviet cars arrived at a former RAF nuclear missile base in East Yorkshire.Twelve years earlier, three American-controlled Thor missiles had stood on that same site, armed with thermonuclear warheads and pointed at the Soviet Union.Now it was being used to prepare Ladas for British customers.And fourteen years later, Lada would outsell Honda in Britain.The story began with the Fiat 124 — but the Soviet version was far more than a simple copy. Engineers subjected the car to brutal testing, discovered that it could not survive Soviet roads, and made more than 800 changes before allowing it into production.The result was the VAZ-2101 — a cheap, brutally simple car that became one of the Soviet Union's most important exports, and one of Britain's strangest automotive success stories.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now!The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury.👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🏁 IN THIS EPISODEWe uncover how the Fiat 124 was rebuilt for Soviet roads, why imported Ladas had to be extensively reworked at a former nuclear missile base in Yorkshire, and how bargain pricing, a huge dealer network and cars like the Niva helped Lada sell more than 30,000 cars in Britain in 1988 — more than Honda.Then we follow Lada's collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, the bizarre role of General Motors electronics and European emissions laws, and the final twist: unwanted British Ladas being shipped back east and sold into Russia, where export-spec cars were actually prized for their better equipment and rust protection.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT📚 The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH📺 Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett🔔 Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#Lada #LadaRiva #VAZ2101 #SovietCars #CarHistory #ColdWar #AvtoVAZ #LadaNiva #Fiat124 #ClassicCars #TheCarNerd