Lada Niva

The Lada Niva is one of 37 Lada models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1977. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Lada Niva properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the BMW BMW 7 Series, the Toyota Toyota Supra, the Ford Ford Fiesta — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lada Niva reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / petrol: / 1.6 L VAZ-2106 / 2106 Straight-four engine / I4 / 1.7 L 21213/4 I4 / 1.8 L 2131 I4 / Diesel engine / diesel: / 1.9 L PSA XUD engine / XUD9A I4 / 1.9 ; kerb weight is recorded at 1,150 kg (2121) / 1,210 kg (21213/21214) / 1,350 kg (2131); drive goes through 4-speed manual (1977–1993) / 5-speed manual (1993–present); the layout is Front-engine, full-time four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Lada story

Within Lada's own catalogue the Lada Niva sits alongside the LADA Granta, the LADA Kalina, the LADA Priora, the Lada (1966). The record names the successor = Lada Niva Travel as its predecessor and the Lada Niva Travel as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Russia: Tolyatti (VAZ, VIS) / Azerbaijan: Hajigabul (Azermash) / Ecuador: Quito (Aymesa) / Egypt: Cairo (Alamal Group) / Ethiopia: Addis Ababa (Holland Car) / Greece: Thebes (Autom.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Lada Niva costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.