According to Plyushkin's precepts: the government does not know how to lead the automobile market out of the dead end

Daily reading of bad automobile news from Russia evokes in the author of these lines an association with Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" and one of its most colorful characters - the richest (800 souls!) landowner Stepan Plyushkin.

On the one hand, the miser Plyushkin in his patched-up zipun received the nickname “a hole in humanity”, on the other…

"...I would like to try to find someone else with so much bread, grain, flour and just in storage, whose storerooms, barns and drying rooms were cluttered with such a multitude of canvases, cloth, dressed and rawhide sheepskins, dried fish and all kinds of vegetables, or gubin..."

And with such wealth, Plyushkin’s serfs either died from backbreaking labor and hunger, or ran away from their master en masse.

In modern Russia, as Novye Izvestia recently noted, 563 thousand cars older than 20 years were sold in just six months of 2025. Most of these chariots are junk cars, which literally not only poison the air for the population with Euro 0 exhaust fumes, but also become "death capsules" for their owners in the event of an accident or unexpected breakdown.

Meanwhile, in the warehouses and parking lots of dealers, like Plyushkin’s senseless stockpiles, for the second year, either 500 or 700 thousand brand new cars have been rusting and gathering dust, which are impossible to sell due to high prices, inflated by government levies in the form of customs duties and recycling fees, as well as because of equally extortionate credit rates.

The Russian authorities – the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Finance – act as the collective Plyushkin for the car market.

Of course, they care about the welfare of the domestic economy, raising the prices of foreign cars by 2.5-3. The program of strangulation of direct import of finished cars is calculated until 2030, when the recycling fee will reach its maximum values. And so that there is no doubt about the implementation of the set goal, the Minister of Industry Alikhanov promises to close any loopholes for any kind of preferential purchases of foreign cars with engines over 160 horsepower.

But the current collapse of the car market can be considered an intermediate result, a kind of checkpoint in the marathon.

And what do we see at this pit stop? Did the unavailability of foreign cars help Russian manufacturers?

Not at all. The stock of unsold cars at AvtoVAZ is growing just like the herds of foreign cars imported by dealers. The flagship of the domestic auto industry is going on vacation, shortening the work week to four days, and promising to cut salaries by 20 percent.

But a couple of weeks ago, the same flagship brought to market the Iskra, which had been awaited for 10 long years!

Where are the tens of thousands of pre-orders? Where are the queues of grateful buyers dreaming of getting a new product? Why hasn't the Tolyatti plant switched to a third shift yet and isn't working on weekends, trying to meet the growing demand?

But there is no excitement, growing demand and thousands of pre-orders. Silence and peace in car dealerships after a powerful PR and advertising exhaust. The author of these lines has been trying for a month to find at least one Muscovite friend who dreams of buying an outdated Renault Logan with rear drum brakes, with bad VAZ engines and a Chinese CVT, which accelerates the Iskra to 100 km per hour in 13.8 seconds.

I'll be honest: I haven't found such a dreamer.

Well, okay, I don't like Iskra. Let's buy a car of a different class from AvtoVAZ. With indexes A, C, D, S, F... But there is nothing except four B-class models, and promises to make some kind of crossover "Azimut" from the same series.

But if the flagship of AvtoVAZ does not even verbally intend to produce cars in a wide range, then who are the duties on Mercedes, BMW, and Land Cruisers protecting it from?

Ah, I remembered that the purpose of duties and recycling fees is to attract foreign manufacturers to Russia. The same ones that left us for political reasons and are not going to repent of what they did until their politicians give the go-ahead.

Therefore, for now, only the Chinese are coming, but very timidly and with a bunch of reservations. Like, for example, Chery under the guise of Kaluga Tenet. At the same time, no one is going to limit sales of Chinese-assembled Chery. It can be assumed that Tenet will, at best, get its one and a half to two percent of the market, remaining a local manufacturer, under the pressure of intense competition with the "parent" company.

The same fate befell the Moskvich project. Losses of 8 billion rubles and a paltry 7.4 thousand cars sold in six months - was this the result that the initiators of the resuscitation of the capital's auto industry were aiming for?

The question is rhetorical. They, of course, wanted production volumes that were orders of magnitude larger. They just forgot to ask the mass buyer: do they really need a Chinese JAC with a Russian nameplate?

In the second half of 2025, the Moskvich plant is going to start production of the first domestic electric car, the Atom. It's a good thing. And the car is quite nice. But the mass Russian buyer shows no interest in electric trains. Not even a single one! Suffice it to say that sales of the Evolute i-PRO electric car localized in Lipetsk amount to about 100 units per month. For the whole of Russia! And the price is very affordable, and there are state benefits... And I would like to ask the Ministry of Industry and Trade once again: are you introducing horrific duties and recycling fees for the sake of the Atom and similar projects?

In a couple of years and several failures in the implementation of risky projects (by the way, Ministry of Industry and Trade, where is your new "Volga" based on the Chinese "Honcha"???) the authorities will receive even worse statistics on the state of the Russian car fleet than today.

Today, there are about 48 million cars in the country, 70.5% of which are older than ten years. The overall average age of cars is 15.5 years. Three years ago, it was 1.5 years less — 14 years.

Let us recall that to renew the country's vehicle fleet, it is necessary to sell at least 2.5-3 million cars per year. In 2024, only 1.5 million were sold. In 2025, there will be another decline in demand and sales.

Probably the only way to revive the automobile industry is to abandon the obviously impossible goals of localizing automobile production in Russia and sharply reduce government taxes on each imported foreign car.

In addition to satisfying public demand for new cars, this measure will save the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of Russians who are currently forced to travel in junk cars.