29 years of production, but you might never heard of it

An asshole and mass murderer like Putin shouldn’t stop me from enjoying the cars of the turmoil of the (once) Soviet car industry – and there were so many fantastic and odd cars in that period. And according to all the rumours, it’s supposed to return, whatever that means. Did I said amazing cars in Soviet times? This is! The ИЖ-2715 has been rolling off the production line at the Izhevsk Automobile Plant for a good 29 years. And if you’re not fluently Russian, it’s the IZH-2715. Its roots go back even longer, to 1967. Because the IZH-2715 is actually a kind of transport version of the Moskvich 412, or its IZH twin, the IZH-2125. And all in all, the IZH-2715 is not only a direct relative of the Moskvich, but also of the Kalachnikov from Izhevsk. Can you still follow?

Cars that have been built for decades and are hardly known beyond the borders of Russia. And for many years, the IZH-2715 was the only light truck in the Soviet Union. The number of variants is hardly manageable, which by the way were also produced in Ukraine, in Cherkassy #Черкаси. The picture shows a car that was produced before 1982, which can be seen at least from the grill and the door handles. There is one tiny detail that I love about this car. And that is the turn signals at the rear. They were combined here from the Izhevsk M-412, the early limosine – whereby the turn signals, which originally adorned a small tail fin, were simply screwed to the rear somehow. Somehow it has to work.