Lada Aura: No Air Conditioning, But at Least You’ll Pay Through the Nose
AvtoVAZ’s supposed flagship sedan, the Lada Aura, has slipped quietly into the grave—so quietly, in fact, that even the cemetery keeper missed it. Production ended back in July with no fanfare, no marching bands, only silence. The reason is obvious: when nobody wants the car, keeping the line running makes no sense.
The numbers are damning. In eight months, just 792 units found buyers. That’s about the same as launching a new product and discovering that not even your relatives will take a free sample. Roughly half the customers were private individuals, the other half corporate buyers—and even they seemed reluctant. Excel spreadsheets likely appealed more than Aura’s cabin, where air conditioning was absent but defective brakes and a glitchy CVT were present.
Then there’s the price tag: from 2.6 million rubles (around €26,000). The so-called “Premier” trim level sounded grand, but in practice it meant leather seats alongside bargain-bin plastics and a full-size spare wheel instead of a repair kit. Step up to “Status,” and all you really gained was existential confusion: you were still driving a Lada, only now you had paid even more for the privilege.
AvtoVAZ insists that “production continues according to market needs.” Which is technically true—when demand is zero, zero is the easiest number to produce.
The result? Unsold cars still languish in showrooms across Samara, Moscow and St. Petersburg, waiting for buyers like Soviet-era stockings gathering dust in a provincial department store. Aura was meant to open a bold new chapter in Lada’s story. Instead, it became a ghost entry: a car nobody sees, nobody remembers, except for dealers staring bitterly at unsold inventory.
