If you do not take into account costs, the platform can be created in five years
Speaking at SPIEF, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that in the future, Moskvich cars will acquire their own, Russian platform. Moskvich has the ability to produce a deeply localized or even its own car, the mayor emphasized. A design engineer who worked in the domestic automobile industry in the 1990s — 2000s told us what is needed to create such a platform and in what time frame it is possible.
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“We need to work on our models, which is what we are doing,” Sobyanin noted. — This year we started small-unit assembly, this is already the second level of localization. And at the same time, we are preparing our own platform. Therefore, Moskvich has every opportunity to produce its own car — either a completely localized one, or even its own car.”
Creating a new domestic passenger car platform from scratch will take at least five years, Alexander Lemberg, who worked in the design bureau of Russian automakers in the 1990s and 2000s, told MK. “You need to have personnel, software to create a platform and a backlog — in fact, a ready-made modern “cart”, the development of which will be a new platform,” explained the designer. “So far, there are problems on all three points that do not allow us to create a platform quickly.”
Personnel — actually car designers — will now have to be at least partially “lured” from the global market, since over the past 15 years, the development of new passenger cars in Russia has been carried out only at VAZ, and it is impossible to train new designers of the required level in the required quantity in a few years. “There will also be a lot of trouble with design software,” the engineer continues. “When developing a serious product, it is difficult to use “pirated” packages, since it is unclear who will take responsibility for this. And domestic programs do not yet cover the entire spectrum of software for developing cars.”
Finally, developing an automobile platform from scratch is not only difficult, but also ineffective. You can do this on the basis of an existing platform — Chinese or other — and then, having invested significant resources, it will take about five years to develop your own passenger car, Lemberg noted.
— But a much more effective and efficient way would probably be to simply buy a starter package — a platform with licenses, developer packages and a number of experts — from those who can sell it to us. In the current circumstances, most likely, these will again be Chinese companies, the question is in the specific conditions.