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18/04/2013 10:18 am
Zil-4102
This is an odd one to me. I just browsed ebay and found a listing and purchased it. The car looks almost like a photoshop stretch and squish job, but in a good way. The color looks like gold, not black as with so many limousines.
Always something new and interesting to take my money.
18/04/2013 10:49 am
It's a new partworks model
Not sure it's been released officially - probably an early sample.
18/04/2013 12:00 pm
The 4102 was a prototype that never made it into production.
Apparently the Zil factory came up with the design in 1987, based on the platform of the elderly but enduringly gorgeous Zil 41041
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but now with front wheel drive and reportedly taking as its styling benchmarks the Rolls Royce Silver Spirit and the Cadillac Fleetwood. Not that you'd ever have guessed. Looks more like it's been cobbled up from body panels from an old Lancia Thema and a 1980s Maserati Quattroporte.
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The car shown above was called "Raika", and taking advantage of Mrs Ogg's Russianist skills I uncovered the information that the factory was so proud of their effort they offered the first two specimens to Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa and baptised the the cars with the couple's nicknames "Mishka" and "Raika".
Strangely enough the couple turned down this generous offer (possibly preferring a real Silver Spirit or Cadillac.) So "Mishka" got scrapped and the gold-coloured "Raika" went the round of Soviet motor shows.
Reports vary but there may have been as many as 4 cars built, but economic factors - and maybe a reluctant realisation that no way was it a convincing rival for cars like the Rolls or the Mercedes S-Class - meant the car never went into production.
Still, it makes an interesting 1:43 model, especially as a fairly cheap partwork, but I hope this partwork might include another car, the Gaz Volga 3111, that actually made it into production between 1998 and 2003, but died a death because it was uneconomic to produce and buyers considered it too expensive (especially since its shiny new exterior concealed some mechanicals virtually unchanged from the 1967 Gaz M24!)
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Still, it does at least have a touch of styling originality, even if it also seems to have borrowed its grille from Lancia!
Graeme.M. Ogg
London U.K.
18/04/2013 4:07 pm
Thanks Mrs. and Mr. Ogg.
I couldn't find much on the car during the day today, but you have filled in many intriguing details.
How rude of the Gorbachevs to turn down the cars. I think it is not a bad looking car but see no hint of Cadillac or Rolls in the styling.
Somewhere stored among many boxes I have a 1/24 version of the Gaz Volga 3111. I bought it years ago at a Toledo toy show from Ray Paskiewicz. I have never seen another. It is a nicely finished resin model with many chromed details and painted a lovely shade of bright yellow!
18/04/2013 5:10 pm
Graeme basically nails it.
The ZIL-4102 "Okean" (if you guess that means "Ocean", pat yourself on the back!) luxury sedan was basically as Graeme described it. Once Gorbachev stupidly killed the GAZ-14 Chayka as a sign of destroying the Nomenklatura, he somewhat quickly realized that there was no adequate replacement. As such, you got really weird luxury car projects like the ZIL-4102 as well as the GAZ-3105 Volga V8 (the GAZ-3111 will not be featured due to its post-Soviet nature; someone already asked the project adviser about that), the latter of which already was released (with undersized hubcaps, but otherwise very nice details). And actually, that is what the final production ZIL-4102 for the SSSR AvtoLegendy partwork will look like. They already have some pics up on RCForum and it looks like those were taken directly from them. Is it hideous? Yeah. But they did a pretty fair job on it. The wheel track seems a bit too narrow on the model, but I'm guessing you could just swap out the axles without too much trouble (I've done it with some of their other cars).
19/04/2013 4:48 am
I was sorry to hear you say they wouldn't be doing the Gaz 3111, J-W, but .....
I just went browsing to see who might be selling the 1:43 Zil 4102 and came across a Spanish model forum called autoescala.net
If you scroll down a little way, it shows some of the deAgostini partwork models and magazine covers, and lo and behold, this is included ...
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So, fingers crossed!
Also shown in the series are the Moskvich 2142, which was a Renault-engined car produced from 1998 until Moskvich went bust in 2002. deAgostini have done both the "Ivan Kalita" 4-door sedan (named after a Russian prince - snappy name for a car, no?)
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and the "Duet" coup?
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They look like a mixture of old Volvo and Chrysler K-car (especially the coup?), and neither one is really as oddly proportioned as the magazine covers make them appear (the sedan photo below seems to be the same photo used on the cover, where they have managed to squash it horizontally)
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Graeme.M. Ogg
London U.K.
19/04/2013 7:56 am
See above Graeme. Tons, and I do means tons of guys have photoshopped mag covers...
...usually for either cars they want or (for the really adventuresome) cars they're going to take a stab at modeling using existing parts!