Renault's relinquished Moscow plant could relaunch a dormant brand, along with promised EVs, but development will be a challenge in uncertain times.
- Renault has transferred its plant in Moscow and its stake to the government of the city, while also giving up its stake in AvtoVAZ to the NAMI institute.
- The Moscow city government has revealed a plan to relaunch the Moskvitch brand at the Renault plant in Moscow, located on the former site of the AZLK plant that produced Moskvitch vehicles for decades.
- The plan faces serious challenges as the country’s auto industry has been largely cut off from western European investment and technology.
Days after Renault transferred its stake in its joint venture to the Russian government for a nominal sum, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin revealed a plan to resurrect the Moskvitch marque, dormant since the early 2000s, at the relinquished Moscow plant that had produced Renault models. The announcement came in the wake of a pullback initiated by foreign automakers with plants in Russia following the start of the Ukraine war, as rumors swirled around the fate of several Volkswagen and Renault plants in the country.
“The first stage will be the production of internal combustion engined cars, and then potentially electric cars,” Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement.
Sobyanin did not indicate whether the gas-engined models or EVs would be developed within the country or produced under license, raising quite a few questions about the feasibility of the project. The mayor did indicate that the KamAZ truck plant, which produces trucks and buses in Naberezhnye Chelny, several hundred miles east of Moscow, would serve as the main engineering partner for the Moskvitch plant. In addition to heavy trucks, KamAZ produces electric city buses.
The Moskvitch 2141 was the last new platform developed by the AZLK plant in the early 1980s, with all subsequent models that debuted through the 1990s relying on it.
AZLK
The Moscow-based AZLK plant—for decades one of the main passenger car production factories in the USSR—was known for its Moskvitch sedans and station wagons at home and in many export markets. The plant, located on Volgogradsky Prospekt in Moscow’s southeast, had seen some tough times in the 1990s when a five-door hatchback named the Moskvitch 2141 that was launched in the mid 1980s effectively became the last available platform, spawning a number of sedans and coupes built in small numbers. The factory had effectively come to a standstill in early 2000s as the country struggled to recover from the financial crisis of 1998, and was eventually absorbed into Renault’s operations years later, producing the inexpensive Logan range of small cars.
“This has been a very unexpected development, first of all, but with the city administration having gotten the plant once again for the first time since the 1990s, something has to be produced there,” Yaroslav V., an eastern European auto historian told Autoweek. “The big question is where they’re going to get the tooling for gas and electric cars at this point, and almost everything really points to China. The Moskvitch factory would have difficulties getting a whole assembly line from some western automaker, while China has plenty of automakers and EVs in production. So they can sell designs and assembly lines.”
“The other option is more AvtoVAZ models under the Moskvitch brand with some exterior differences, but that would probably cause oversupply of current models. That would be a simple solution, and perhaps something that will also end up happening.”
Industry observers in Russia have speculated that the plant won’t be able to keep Renault production going even if it wanted to, due to the need to source components from Renault, effectively closing the door to existing platforms produced at the plant. Auto industry watchers have also noted that funding for a plant retrofit to restart car production would be difficult in the near term, given that car sales in Russia have fallen over 70% since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The plant’s saucer-shaped museum remained open years after Moskvitch production ended.
Sergey Rodovnichenko
“I don’t see them doing something quickly with the Moskvitch project, given where car sales and priorities are right now,” Yaroslav adds. “But with the upcoming end of imports of some western brands, demand for domestic models will have to return to levels unseen for decades because Russia will now have to build a lot of its own cars instead of importing them. With the current political situation and the pullout of several automakers, the domestic car industry is going to have to grow really fast in the coming years to keep up with demand. But mostly, I believe this will be a boon for Chinese brands that will want to take advantage of export opportunities.”
European auto industry observers are also noting that amid the confident announcements from the city government, if bringing back Moskvitch was so easy, why wasn’t it done years ago when economic conditions were much more favorable? Now the new owners of the plant face a much bleaker supply chain environment and perhaps tighter budgets, even when it comes to putting internal combustion models into production. The only upside the project faces is the fact that competition from imported models is likely to be much weaker in the coming years, as there won’t be as many foreign brands left on the market.
Keyword: Resurrecting Moskvitch Won’t Be Easy for Russia