British car designer Steve Mattin has put the brakes on Lada jokes
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10353807/British-car-designer-Steve-Mattin-has-put-the-brakes-on-Lada-jokes.html
Ask Steve Mattin whether he has any qualms about moving to Russia, and he answers with another question.
6:02PM BST 03 Oct 2013
42 Comments“How often,” the Coventry-trained car designer asks, “do you get the opportunity to come into a company with a completely blank sheet of paper?”
The answer for professional car designers like Mr Mattin, 48, who previously worked at Mercedes for 18 years before a four-year stint at Volvo, is almost never.
Even so, when he was first asked to re-design one of Russia’s most iconic, but not exactly best loved, brands he admits he did not exactly leap at the chance.
“I really thought twice – 'do I want to design Ladas?’” he laughs. “But it was such a fantastic opportunity to change things. You very seldom get such backing from the company to change everything.”
Recent years have not been kind to Lada, the brand that started life as the Soviet Union’s version of a people’s car in the 1970s.
Abroad, it is still best known as the butt of tired jokes. (How do you double the value of a Lada? Fill it with petrol. A man goes to a mechanic and asks for a new windscreen wiper for his Lada. “Seems like a fair swap,” says the mechanic).
Even in Russia, the conventional wisdom among drivers is to avoid the domestic brand if you can afford to.
By the time Mr Mattin arrived in Russia in 2011, the company had very nearly died.
The financial crisis had flattened sales figures and forced AvtoVAZ, the state-controlled car company that has churned out Ladas since 1970, to lay off nearly 22,500 workers. It was only saved by a 20bn rouble (£400m) Russian government bail-out. By the end of 2009, Vladimir Putin’s government had extended R75bn in financial assistance to the company.
Lada so far retains its inherited dominance of the domestic car market – it sold 537,625 units in Russia in 2012, almost 20pc of the national market – largely thanks to being the most affordable option for thousands of Russians. But foreign brands are fast eroding its lead, even in the budget market. In 2012, the average price for a new Lada in Russia was $10,800 (£6,679), compared with $9,549 for a Daewoo, according to the industry think tank Avtostat. It was the first time a foreign brand had undercut the market leader, and it was a wake-up call.
“Lada can’t rely on the brand being just cheap anymore,” says Mr Mattin. “The Russian market is becoming increasingly more competitive and that's why we need to make a big change."
The boxy Zhiguli, still ubiquitous on the streets of Moscow and other post-Soviet cities, officially went through several permutations between its launch in 1970 and the final end of production last year – but the utilitarian rejection of anything approaching streamlining was constant throughout.
And the strange, angular outline of Lada’s much-loved 4x4 model, the Niva, has barely changed since it first went into production in 1977. The only exception was the “Chevrolet Niva”, the product of a joint venture with the US that is widely regarded by Russian petrol heads as a mistake best forgotten.
“Design has not been as important here in Russia as elsewhere,” says Mr Mattin. “Everyone knows what a Lada looks like, but there has never been a real emphasis on design. That will change in the future. The X-ray concept gives an insight of what to expect in the future."
His first prescription was to “emotionalise” the Lada brand.
In layman’s language, that means playing around with proportions, lines and angles to get away from the utilitarian, box-like look that currently characterises it.
The result, which was unveiled at the Moscow car show in late 2012, is what Mr Mattin calls the X-ray concept: a distinctive x-shaped grille and almost aggressively bold signature body sculpting that will characterise a new range of vehicles scheduled to roll off production lines in 2015.
“It is a very bold, distinctive front end. You’ll always be able to tell you’re looking at a Lada in the future,” he said. “I set out to create a new face from the brand. The more we developed the x-theme graphic for the front end, the stronger and better it got.”
Changing the look of Lada is just one part of a massive re-branding exercise reminiscent of the reinvention of Skoda when it was acquired by Volkswagen in the early 1990s.
There will also be a new range of vehicles, a new focus on the cross-over segment, the fastest growing in Russia, and a conscious decision to appeal to the growing Russian middle class.
A new design bureau housed in an 18th century mansion in central Moscow – deliberately distant from the company headquarters in the one-company town of Tolyatti, 500 miles south-east of Moscow – is part of Mr Mattin’s plans to incubate domestic talent and get the company to start “thinking differently”.
The stakes are high. Russia has the fastest growing car market in Europe, and is well on its way to overtaking Germany as Europe’s largest. According to the Association of European Businesses, 2.935m cars and light vans were sold in Russia in 2012, up 10pc on the previous year.
Renault-Nissan has bet heavily on the revival of the Soviet-era brand, buying a minority stake from state-owned Russian Technologies in 2008 and in May this year announcing plans to double its share to 50pc by 2014.
“We’ve achieved a lot in two years. I wouldn’t still be here if we hadn’t,” says the British designer. “What happens a generation down the line? Well, we’ll see. It is certainly going to be an exciting future for the Lada brand.”