Ridiculous Rebadges: Soviet American Cars Edition

"Amoore100" (amoore100)
08/24/2015 at 22:28 • Filed to: Ridiculous Rebadges, Chrysler, Sebring, Dodge, Stratus, Volga, Siber

Welcome to Ridiculous Rebadges, a series of articles in which I go through and examine the details and circumstances surrounding some of the more infamous and some of the more esoteric vehicular rebadges throughout automotive history.

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I apologize that this week’s Ridiculous Rebadge is a bit late, but !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , so please forgive us...anyways, today’s Ridiculous Rebadge hails from Mother Russia, where most of the cars are ancient rebadges or crappy designs, because Communism. The Volga Siber was a car that had an unlikely origin: instead of Western Europe, its roots hailed from America. Based on the 2001-2006 Chrysler Sebring/Dodge Stratus, the car was pretty crappy to begin with, not helped by the fact that when Chrysler gave the GAZ company the molds for the car, it was 2007 and the design was sorely out of date. Now, this matters less in a not-so-competitive market such as Russia, where transportation only has to be cheap and reliable, if not always reliable, at least cheap. To differentiate itself from the Chrysler models, GAZ hired Ultramotive to fix up the front fascia before tightening the suspension for Russian roads and selling it to the public. However, the next year the economic recession hit, and only 9000 Sibers were made at the close of the model line in 2010, after which quickly the Volga name was discontinued. So while Chrysler itself was going bankrupt, it entirely killed off another automotive name (though not directly).

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Chrysler Sebring/Dodge Stratus JR