AvtoVAZ will produce a new line of cars under the Lada Iskra brand

AvtoVAZ has chosen a name for a new line of cars based on the CMF-B platform, inherited from a former Renault shareholder, Lada Iskra. The family, consisting of a sedan, station wagon and cross-station wagon, should enter the market in 2025, and by 2027 should replace the current budget bestseller Lada Granta on the assembly line. Before the start of the crisis and the departure of Renault from the Russian Federation, it was assumed that the CMF-B-based model would enter the market at the end of 2022.

The head of AvtoVAZ, Maxim Sokolov, during SPIEF-2023, said that a new family of budget cars based on the global CMF-B platform will be called Lada Iskra. “The new family of vehicles replacing the Granta will be called the Iskra. This decision has already been approved by the board, and it is under this brand that a whole family of our new cars will be sold in three variations: a sedan, station wagon and, probably, a station wagon,” he said (quoted from “Interfax”).

In May 2022, Renault, at that time the main shareholder of AvtoVAZ, handed over its share (67.6%) for 1 rub. FSUE NAMI (subordinate to the Ministry of Industry and Trade). Kommersant’s sources said that the Russian authorities demanded from Renault the rights to new models and a license to produce them for several years.

CMF-B is the Renault-Nissan Alliance platform. It is used for the new Logan and Sandero models of another budget Renault brand – the Romanian Dacia. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in 2022, Renault planned to update the AvtoVAZ lineup precisely at the expense of models based on the CMF-B. Moreover, the first such model should have been presented as early as the end of 2022.

The start of production of Lada Iskra is scheduled for the end of 2024, the start of sales – for 2025, Maxim Sokolov said. The design of the new family will echo Vesta.

AvtoVAZ’s current bestseller and budget model, Lada Granta, will be produced for some time, and “in the future, Granta, like any other model, will become a thing of the past,” said the head of the concern. He clarified that the production of Granta is planned to be discontinued by 2027. Granta is one of three AvtoVAZ own models besides Niva and Vesta.

AvtoVAZ invested 17 billion rubles in the Iskra family project. Another 20 billion rubles, according to Maxim Sokolov, must be invested “in order to replace those parts of the platform and components that fell under sanctions and which global suppliers refused to supply in order to reduce risks and achieve local technological sovereignty using this model.” If AvtoVAZ had not started using the CMF-B developments and started developing its own car from scratch, the costs, according to Maxim Sokolov, would have amounted to 70-80 billion rubles.

Mr. Sokolov explained the choice of the model name by the fact that “this is a new step, the first family of cars produced at a new stage in the life of AvtoVAZ”: her flight. Well, in the end, it really is fire, which is good.

Olga Nikitina