OREANDA-NEWS. September 02, 2015. At present, the total capacity of Russian car market allows to produce about 3 million cars. In the current year, according to the forecast of the analytic agency "AUTOSTAT" in Russia, it will be assembled 1.2-1.3 million cars. That is, the production will be reduced by approximately 25% compared to 2014 year (1.66 million units) and by almost 40% compared to the peak that was reached in 2012 (1.96 million units).

Analysts have concluded that the Russian car industry this year will be loaded only by 40% of its capacity, while the global average load of car plants is 80-85%. However, according to the director of the agency "AUTOSTAT", Sergey Tselikov, "now the situation is much better than in the crisis year of 2009. Then, after the crisis of overproduction of 2008, total production of Russian car plants was only 598,000 passenger cars. Then the capacity allowed the production of 2.5 million cars and they were loaded only by 25%".

Low capacity utilization is now observed at the "Ford" in Vsevolozhsk and PSMA in Kaluga. In addition, GM closed its assembly plant in St. Petersburg, where it produced cars Chevrolet and Opel. Also, because of financial problems, the plant "TagAz" is stopped in Taganrog since the last year. At the same time, Hyundai-Kia car plant in St. Petersburg is running actually at full capacity and it even thinks about expansion. Great prospects are at the plant "IzhAvto" in Izhevsk, where "AvtoVAZ" carries out systematically a part of the assembly from Togliatti and where it launches a new model of LADA Vesta on September 25th.