Copying the Fiat 600 in Ukraine: ZAZ 965

In 1960 the Soviet Union was building up and modernizing its industrial empire but still lacked of one thing to elevate itself to the same level of Western capitalistic countries: mass motorisation.
Having practically no knowledge of how to build a decent car, the most obvious choice would be to license one and produce it internally. But this, due to political reasons, was completely off the table.

So, why not take a western car and copy it, but change just some bits?
Maybe producing it in a industry that made agricultural tractors.

This was the reasoning behind the design of the ZAZ 965. They took the Fiat 600, and copied its entire chassis, to a level that even the hood lines are similar. But it was not possible, probably due to lack of knowledge of the processes, to copy even the engine.

First hypothesis was a motocyclistic 650 cc 2 cyl MD-65 from “Dnepr” and “Ural”, but this would lead to a quick wear out of the components, due to a torque curve not suitable for the traffic it would have encountered and a low top speed that would have forced the driver to drive always at maximum speed.
Expected life for this engine was 30,000 km.

So they had to resort to something different: a V4 air cooled engine (instead of a liquid-cooled I4 on the Fiat 600) with slightly less more displacements and sort of the same power. Even a boxer one was proposed.
26 HP (in later models) that mated to a 600-inspired transmission had 4 gears, which the last 3 of them synchronized. Not very efficient though, making it possible only to reach 80 km/h.

The different engine size and dimension obliged them to produce a 3 volumes car, with the third volume in accordance to the fashion of the time, like on cars as the Lloyd 600 or the Glas Goggomobil.
But there was a serious problem with the cooling of the engine in that zone. People tried removing the small side grilles (called Wasserman, in honour to the worker who found the solution) in the early models, but actually worsened the problem.
Eventually it was necessary to modify the shape of the car and add intake ducts just before the rear wheels.

It had a toggle switch for the indicator lights and suicide doors. It was also imported in Europe and almost 300 of them were sold in the Benelux region. Sadly, after just one “engineering restyling” and just 13 years of production it was substituted. By the revisited copy of the NSU Prinz, the ZAZ-968.

But its short life was posthumously honored by a brief apperance in the James Bond film of 1995 GoldenEye.

Just another star in the galaxy of the soviet car industry. Never reaching their targets (the actual mass motorisation car was the later Lada 2101, as explained in the first episode of James May’s Cars of the People), but still praised by the Communist Leaders.
Nikita Chruščёv said it could be “a good gift for the workers as long at it was at a fair price”.