CAR COMPARISONS: Lada Samara: When Peter Brock sold his soul to the Russians

Brock shocker from the Eastern Bloc, wrote Tony Davis in 1996 in his scathing take-down of the Aussie version of Russia’s woeful Lada Samara.

Story by Tony Davis originally published in Drive on 23 August, 1996.

There is low price and there is good value. Then there is the assembled-in-Russia Samara.

If a worse car than the Lada Samara has been launched in Australia since the 1950s, someone has kept it very quiet.

For this writer’s money, the Samara is as bad as it gets and it’s a miracle that they sold any, let alone “not many”.

In early 1988 it was announced that the Australian market was soon to see not just its first Soviet passenger car, but the very same four-seater, three-door hatch which had “taken Europe by storm”.

Equally surprising, one of the people involved with the new Lada was one Mr P. Brock, who had suddenly found a bit of free time following his rather well-publicised blue with Holden.

A flash unveiling was organised by the French importer of a car built in Russia to a partially Italian design. (The USSR was a big buyer of Fiat technology, which it paid for in second-rate steel used to build Alfa Romeos. And that’s no joke.)

To add to the cosmopolitan feel, the cars were rebuilt in Melbourne. Rebuilt? Yes, the importers were reputedly spending $2000 per car getting them to a state that was acceptable to Australian car buyers.

Very, very non-discerning buyers, that is.

Sixty changes were required to make the Samara comply with Australian Design Rules before quality issues were even considered.

The Samara was not bad looking, but even at 20 paces you could see the woeful nature of such things as body fit and colour matching, as well as the nastiness of the plastics used in the bumpers and grille.

This writer composed a two-foolscap-page list of faults about the first example he drove. Everything that could squeak, did; many things that should have worked, didn’t. And lots of things actually fell off.

The freshly renamed Brock Organisation was trying to save itself by becoming Lada’s “external consultant organisation”.

At the HDT factory, where Brock once modified thousands of Commodores, scores of Ladas were “Australian-ised” then stamped with a plaque on the engine block which said: “Brock quality approved”.

The official slogan was “value is everything” but the perpetrators probably should have adapted Brock’s own HDT motto (“We build excitement”) and announced: “We build excrement.”

Launched at a shade under $11,000, making it even cheaper than the also-new-to-Australia Hyundai Excel, the Samara’s price soon dropped below $10,000 as word-of-mouth caught up with it.

“From this springboard we will be taking some exciting steps forward,” Brock had said at the mid-1988 launch.

A few months later he sold out his interest and bade the Lada people goodbye.

The initial talk had been of 500 units per month. The reality was a trickle and attempts to rename the Samara – it became the 1300 and Volante – and extend the warranty didn’t convert the non-believers.