Vehicle
Lada Niva
Two vehicles under one name, and confusing them is the most common mistake made about this make. The Niva Legend is the 1977 VAZ-2121: a permanent four-wheel-drive unitary-body off-roader with a locking centre differential, carburetted for most of its life and fuel-injected only from the mid-1990s, still in production essentially unchanged. The Niva Travel is the former Chevrolet Niva — a 2002 joint-venture vehicle with GM, a different body, a different platform and different engine management. A code list for one says nothing about the other.
Generations
-
VAZ-2121 (Legend) 1977–present
The original unitary-body off-roader with permanent four-wheel drive and a locking centre differential; carburetted until the mid-1990s, injected since, and otherwise little changed.
- Body styles
- SUV
- Platform
- VAZ-2121
- Engines
-
- 1.7 — VAZ-21214 · petrol · 61 kW (82 hp)
- 1.7 LPG — VAZ-21214 · LPG bi-fuel · 61 kW (82 hp)
- 1.6 — petrol
- 1.8 — petrol
- 1.9 — XUD9A · diesel
- 1.9 — XUD9SD · diesel · 55 kW (74 hp) · 135 Nm (100 lb-ft) · VAZ-21215
- Transmissions
- 5-speed manual · 4-speed manual
- Drivetrain
- Four-wheel drive
-
Niva Travel 2020–present
The former Chevrolet Niva, taken back in-house — a separate vehicle from the Legend in body, platform and engine management despite the shared name.
- Body styles
- SUV
- Platform
- GM-AvtoVAZ
- Engines
-
- 1.7 VAZ-2123 — petrol · 59–61 kW (79–82 hp)
- Transmissions
- 5-speed manual
- Drivetrain
- Four-wheel drive
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Posted about the Lada Niva
Be the first to write this up
Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
Sign in or create an account to add what you found about Lada Niva.