The prospects for the Russian automotive industry in the current environment look depressing. At best, it will be a SKD where Russia will invest and China will supply spare parts. Disappointing forecasts were voiced by most experts on Friday during the round table organized by Reedus “Will the ‘Moskvichization’ of the automotive industry help the automotive market survive under sanctions?”
Throughout its development, the Russian caravan has followed the path of theft and borrowing, noted automotive journalist and expert Sergey Aslanyan. Now, under the sanctions, there will be nowhere to peep and buy. In addition, Russia does not have its own component manufacturing industry.
We don’t have electronics factories, we don’t have anything to make an engine out of. We have “Niva”, which is 45 years old, 20% consists of imports. Moreover, she has pistons and piston rings of the American corporation Federal Mogul. And now we will even have nothing to assemble the Niva from. What are we going to make ABS from? Who will present us with an airbag? Nobody. We don’t even have bearings, — lists the expert.
According to him, all domestic cars, with the exception of the very Niva, are a complete failure. And now even this failure is nothing to collect from.
Our automotive industry turned out to be borrowed, it left us, it is impossible to adapt its broken trough to this industrial landscape. We don’t have car factories, and we don’t have anything to make cars out of, he stated.
The country lacks a basic basis for the existence of the auto industry, agreed the coordinator of the public organization of motorists “Blue Buckets” Peter Shkumatov. Cars are a kind of pinnacle of the overall level of technological development, if it goes organically, he explained.
This is called “the depth of the division of labor.” Relatively speaking, if you want to produce a car with several thousand components, you cannot produce everything yourself. More precisely, you can, but half of these components will be produced with the wrong quality, in the wrong volume, not as fast, and so on. The modern automobile emerges from global cooperation, the expert stressed.
The Russian authorities have always focused on car factories, on the “tip of the iceberg”, but this is wrong, he believes. “A car factory is the crown of a large infrastructure, but not vice versa. Our car factories are now hanging in the air, because billions were poured into them, and they didn’t pay attention to what was under them, ”Shkumatov specified.
The last “nail in the coffin” for the development of the auto shop in Russia is the lack of long-term money and cheap loans, which makes any long-term investment projects meaningless, whether it is the creation of the production of cars or components for them.
According to the expert, the task can be formulated as follows: if we want to have an auto industry – ours, real, Russian – then it will be long and expensive. If you want to quickly and cheaply, at best we will get an imitation, when Chinese, in fact, cars will have nameplates made in Russia, at worst – nothing.
Another big problem is the quality of engineering education in Russia. According to the vice-president of the National Automobile Union, Jan Haytseera, the level of education in automotive specialties in universities is so low that it does not allow graduates to work even at a regular car service.
According to Maxim Shishko, General Director of AVTODOM Subscription, it’s still not worth talking regarding the complete demise of the auto industry in Russia: it will be supported in order to save jobs, but it will be an outdated and heavily subsidized production.
A little more optimistic is the deputy of the City Council of Naberezhnye Chelny from the “Party of Growth”, the general director of the Dalini Group of Companies Ruslan Nigmatulin. He believes that the exit of foreign companies opens a window of opportunity for Russian enterprises, which previously found it difficult to compete with global corporations. Some things that cannot be done in Russia can be brought from China, India and other conditionally friendly countries.
Of course, we will have to forget regarding the rapid growth that was observed when foreign brands entered Russia with investments and technologies, the expert admits, but the automotive industry will remain in any case. What quality it will be and how it will look is another question.
