Russia is shutting down mass production of Putin's luxury cars

Mass production of the Russian luxury car brand Aurus, which was created as a prestige project for the Kremlin leadership, has been deemed completely unprofitable. Due to the lack of economic justification and severe losses, the assembly plant in Tatarstan is slated for closure. 

The actual failure of this large-scale automotive project is also confirmed by experts associated with the Russian State Scientific Center “NAMI,” which was directly involved in developing this line of vehicles. As expected, the Russian automotive industry failed to turn the “presidential toy” into a full-fledged mass-market brand due to a complete lack of economic logic, even though the country’s leadership had initially set extremely high ambitions.

Experts attribute the initiative’s failure to the fact that the attempt to create a mass-market Russian equivalent of Rolls-Royce was doomed from the start. At the same time, the aggressor country is catastrophically lacking in financial investment, modern technologies, and reliable international partners to bring the project to a more mass-market and profitable level comparable to a Russian Audi or BMW. However, analysts warn that the Russian authorities will try to artificially keep this image-building project afloat until the very end, shifting it to a format of purely small-scale, artificial production under state orders.

This was reported by the specialized Telegram channel “Russian Car etc,” founded by auto expert Sergey Tsyganov, citing its own informed sources.

The Senat 900 sedan was unveiled for the first time at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum; Russian authorities and the media are positioning it as a new domestic “executive-class” car. However, behind the flashy label lies a significant detail: the so-called pride of the Russian auto industry turned out to be a copy of the Chinese Hongqi H9, which has been in mass production in China since 2020. 

A Chinese TV factory has shut down in Russia due to sanctions.