Gaz VOLGA M21 Goes for a Drive

What did Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel into space, do? That's right, a m21 gas volca. You join me today behind the wheel of one. Come for a walk. Hello, welcome to

drive

with fury. Today we have gone behind the iron curtain because this is a gas.

volga

m21 mark iii now gaz as i'm sure you know it means golkovsky automobile knee zavod or gorky automobile factory and they built cars that were above the trebant muscovitch average these were cars for mid-ranking party officials these are The cars that were also given to the KGB, so if one of these stopped outside your house in the middle of the night, it was time to get out the back window.

The obvious thing to note about this car is how American it looks, it's obviously a very, very Russian Soviet Union adopts the 1950s American look. I mean, if you really don't have to squint too much and you can be looking at a forged shoebox from 1953, you really can't, but this is obviously very Russian, but incredibly so. This was actually designed for the export market and it's hard to think that the PCC had an export market, but this was the car they planned to release to the world as an example of what Russian technology could do, hence the fact.

Its design is so American, but what you will notice is that the proportions are very different, the styling details, the fins, the chrome, the big bumpers, the incredibly exaggerated front radiator, they are all purely American, the proportions are They stretch vertically, so it's not low and wide like a big Buick. or a 1953 Oldsmobile, it's tall and narrow and if you look under the car you'll see it has nine inches of ground clearance. These are cars built for Russian conditions, which means bad weather and bad roads, so the metal is very thick. The ground clearance is huge, the suspension is as tough as old boots and they have the best rust protection of anything you could find in the '50s or '60s, and that's another highlight of this car, it was featured in 1953 and ran until 1969.

With only minor cosmetic changes, something that doesn't really happen on Western cars, they will be updated much more frequently. Overall the changes were mainly to the grille and badge area, being a 3 Series they had become much more stylized and the deer icon badge hood ornament had been reduced to just a badge. flat at this point rather than an actual jumping hood mascot, much like the leaping jaguar we used to see in jaguars. There were several incidents where people were impaled on the jumping deer. from the front of the car and decided that maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all, so this was the most luxurious car a Soviet citizen could buy in the 1960s and even then there was a long waiting list for it.

The first owner of this car was a fairly high-ranking mid-ranking party official and he had to wait eight years to get it. What denotes that this particular car is a particularly high-spec version of the Mark III are the chrome fins at the rear and the chrome accents. Around the windows they all have this aluminum detail at the bottom and look at this beautiful pressure on the door. This isn't really art deco, but it's certainly mid-50s Americana gone mad, especially with the whitewall tires now for export. In the market, these were sent as virtually finished kits, without engine or gearbox, to Southern Pix in Belgium, where they were fitted with virtually any engine they wanted, many of them being Perkins diesels, and then apparently introduced to them Rover engines and these were known. like the scaldia vulgas and they had other options that were not available in the local market, for example other colors, another color roof, that kind of thing now here under the hood we will find a four-cylinder, monocarburetor, two and a half liter gasoline engine Now , this thing develops 80 horsepower and 176 Nm of torque, which isn't much considering the car weighs 1,442 kilograms, which is a lot of thrust needed to pull such a heavy car, however, it's built ruggedly built, strong and reliable.

There's not much to go wrong with such a simple basic motor, but aside from the thickness of the steel throughout, the thickness of the cables, and the overall sturdy construction, another interesting thing to note here is this Venetian blind on the back. front of the radiator. This is a grill This is a grill that is operated from inside the car with a lever, so in the colder winters, which are very cold in Russia, you can close the radiator so it warms up faster. Now I would say everyone. These came with the two and a half liter four cylinder, but that wouldn't be entirely true because there was a slight variant called the m23 that was only available for the kgb.

It was much more powerful being a v8, however, apparently the kgb was not. I don't like the handling because it was much heavier than the four cylinder, now that the engine also found its way into an estate version of the car, but that was an export only model, now the rear of this car is quite ornate looking. on these tail lights they are beautiful works of art, they are sculptures from the 20s or something interesting, although there is no separate indicator, this red tail light is also the turn signal flasher, of course we have the big chrome fins and the big chrome bumpers, and check out this beautiful gas deer or prancing deer logo that also doubles as a license plate light.

Now the button to enter the trunk is not on the trunk panel, it is on the body of the cast. Push that elevator up and you're done. in this huge huge cavern this

goes

back so far you can actually if you're a kgb officer put a body in the trunk in the back here we have a nice carpet everywhere we have the spare tire tucked in the side a huge wheel stand we even have jump cables with Cyrillic instructions on the right let's take a look inside this car there are a couple of things we should notice before we get on first of all this little handle here in the corner of this big bench don't forget this is a bench in the front seat, a bench in the back, it's a six seater, but this reclines the seat horizontally so the whole car becomes a giant double bed on wheels, it's not that fascinating Secondly, look at this amazing fabric on the seat this is the actual original fabric the vinyl has been replaced because it got sunburned but this is the original fabric and look how little there is in this corner where people have slipped in and out over the years, but that's so little wear and tear because the mileage on this car is an astronomically low 14,603 miles in half a century, that's crazy right, let's look around, sliding behind this huge Steering wheel that is white like a Mercedes, don't forget that these were called the Mercedes of Russia. or the Russian Mercedes, so it has a white 190 type steering wheel that is very, very nice, in fact, very ornate, this horn ring, all that doesn't work anymore, there is a button on the dashboard for that, we'll see in one second we have our gasoline logo deer on this beautiful small acrylic and chrome plate that looks absolutely beautiful.

Now let's zoom in and look at the door, first of all, nothing is electric in this car, unlike its American rivals that it has. manual windows manual side lights no electrification just a big plain body color door panel on top and then a contrast color on a soft vinyl in the middle and a nice little door that opens to the side now, oddly enough , the door is body color but the dash has contrast Also, this particular car has a gray dash, this is correct as it would have been factory. Other cars got different colors depending on the exterior color.

Now we have a lot of controls around us here, let's get started. On the top, though, I love this speedometer, but it's so space age that not only is it green perspex which gives it that beautiful glow, but it's also backlit from the back, so the light coming in through the windshield actually illuminates the dial from behind or front. I have to say it's awesome now that we have a cluster of gauges that aren't actually in a separate cluster like they would be in other cars, they're separate on the dash, but I guess it's kind of 50's style.

Which now i have been brushing up on my russian today this is the electricity this is the fuel level water and oil now for those of you who want to learn a little russian there are the words now below that on the left side above the knee we have a lot of buttons and controls this is the heater which is apparently hot and cold or hot and cold on these two sliders right here this little white sphere hidden virtually under the dash are the windshield wipers a big cast aluminum thing down here for our parking brake, then the hood release which is pronounced capac and then here is the almost hidden black plastic control which is for the cold weather radiator shutter and then below those three we have a couple more controls, foot or floor mounted . headlight mounted flashers are not that uncommon but on top of that we have a floor mounted foot operated windshield washer which is less common certainly going up here we now have control of the headlights a generator warning and on the other side we have I have the new switch for the horn that is very period according to the right sound and this, believe it or not, is cruise control.

It is a cable operated to the carburetor. This is effectively just a throttle cable, so set it to 50 or 60 miles per hour, take it out and you'll continue at that speed almost indefinitely until you run out of gas, something else under the dash we don't know about and on the other side from the radio we have a choke and then The radio itself is a work of art. Check out this beautiful grill here. Unfortunately, it's fantastic. Although this radio works, it is not actually broadcast on a frequency that we receive or transmit in this country, so we cannot listen to it.

Right now we have the watch that we have the legend yelano is ccp or made in Russia, which was an abbreviation of fact strong apparently and the glove box and that's it, we have a lot of headroom, it's a very tall car, but I'll notice something We don't have any seat belts in front or behind, so the best option here is not to crash. There is another curiosity that is not something common, I think I have seen it once in a car. Certainly this. side of 19 I don't know what actually this little rotary dial is for raising and lowering the radio antenna on the roof, so if you go under a low bridge or enter a low garage, you can flatten the radio antenna without having to go out.

Very clever indeed, now getting in the back we have the same absolutely fantastic, absolutely mid-century Soviet Union fabric, greeting us in the back in this big back seat and you get in here, the door doesn't open too far, but I have the most legroom you have ever seen. This is a car that officials were driving in, so they have plenty of room back here. A large ashtray, obviously, to put ashes in. doors beyond, same as the front, just basic controls in the center, we have a large dome light that fills the entire interior and then looking behind us, a very, very large parcel shelf, well, this is it. we will call the t-shirt because if this The entire double seating system will become a double bed.

So this would be the shelf next to the bed so you have your morning tea here on the shelf in the back of the car. Now we are going to take my first trip on a Volga, that is a change of column as a preview of the same era. We are leaving now. I was told there is no synchro in first gear so when we raise it again I have to go back down through the gearbox. Oh wow, it's soft, it really is quite. Smooth, it's not a fast car, but it's also not a place to

drive

quickly, so it works pretty well.

The steering isn't as heavy as I expected and there doesn't seem to be any play in the system, but the car is practically brand name. New in terms of mileage, now stopping is something we have to pay some attention to because it has drum brakes everywhere and it is a heavy car for the drum brakes to be effective and this is a left hand drive car. They made a right-hand drive version specifically for the UK market, they even put a floor-mounted gearchange on it, but that pretty much didn't sell even though it was cheaper than a Humber Hawk, so yeah, these cars were only available to seniors. or mid-ranking party officials, unless you became a taxi driver, ambulance driver or joined the kgb, unless also the other route to getting one was to be the first man in space, since Yuri Gagarin was awarded oneof these cars and his car was unique. because it had the light blue dashboard, which is the only one that has that color installed.

Now I'm driving through the streets of Cambridge today and it feels very appropriate, it's very easy to drive a kgb style car around the spy city. I quite like column shift boxes, they are a bit unusual to get used to, but once you get the hang of them, they are very simple and very easy because they are right next to your hand on the steering wheel. you barely have to move your wrist from the steering wheel to the gear shift and that's when a thought just occurred to me, even though I said this car has 14,605 ​​miles, this speedometer is in kilometers, so it's about three quarters or two thirds.

On top of that, this car barely runs which is a violent drag and these cars were built extremely tough for tough Russian roads so the speed bumps that plague modern cities aren't really a problem for the suspension, it just rocks. on him happily. it has a lovely smoothness suspended ride you feel like you are drifting and gliding over everything you can feel how imperious you would be if you were driving one of these in the old soviet days everyone would bow in front of you possibly now in fear despite the waiting lists After many years and a long production cycle of 11 years, 639,478 of these cars were actually built, which is quite a lot, plus a few more estates and of course there were also the Belgians, of course, so around Three-quarters of a million of these things were around at some point, but despite those high production figures, there are virtually none in Western Europe and in the UK only 18 are known to obviously include this one, so so the current owner actually acquired this car in Bulgaria. where he had bought it from its first owner, who had been a fairly high-ranking official and used to be driven around in the back of the car with the curtains closed while he did his important paperwork, now finding parts has been difficult for the owner.

In fact, I made a trip to St. Petersburg to go to the official gas store and buy spare parts, so thanks for looking. I really hope you enjoyed this trip behind the iron curtains in the old days, if so please do. Please like and subscribe because YouTube really values ​​that kind of stuff and join me next time I drive something completely different.