Hey, Baby, Is This Horse Bothering You?: Cold Start

Cs Ishcombi
ADVERTISEMENT

This ISH 1500 Kombi, also known as a IZh 2125 Kombi or a Moskvitch 1500 Kombi,  is one of my favorite of the mainstream Soviet cars, and is generally regarded as the first Soviet hatchback. It’s really more of a wagon, technically, but it absolutely has a hatchback, and was quite a practical family car. With that in mind, this ad is especially odd, since I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a driver look as much like he’s hitting on someone as Sergei Sunglasses here is, to that lady on the horse.

I mean, look at the body language here: one hand draped over the steering wheel, leaning completely out that window, elbow and pushed-up jacket sleeve on that door, everything in the service of putting the moves on the blonde on the stallion.

Plus, he seems to have driven all the way out into a field, not a road in sight, to corner Svetlana there and tell her that if she needs a ride, she can just toss that big dumb animal in the hatch and hop in the car.

Let a player play, I suppose.

22 thoughts on “Hey, Baby, Is This Horse Bothering You?: Cold Start

  1. Oh, those russians! (just thinking of a Boney M song now..)

    Who elso would take a Renault 10 front, make it a bit uglier, and then stick it on a bad knock off Opel?

  2. Why did 1970’s europeans spend so much time driving into fields? I lived on a damn farm and we almost never drove cars or trucks into the middle of a field.

  3. Ha, it’s been a while since I last saw an Izh.
    When I was a kid I used to ride on the bed of an Izh 2715, which was a sort of makeshift pickup that people made from the original panel vans, by, yes, you guessed it, removing the panel.
    A 2 in 1 vehicle, panel van in the winter, pickup in the summer.
    They’ve probably all rotted away to nothing since then, I still remember the typical smell of the interior.

  4. I believe the Kombi was developed in-house by IZH as their own modification, whereas usually they just built Moskvitch designs as-is to provide extra volume beyond what AZLK could do at their own plant. In a way, it’s a Soviet counterpart to the VAM Lerma

  5. ” It’s really more of a wagon, technically, but it absolutely has a hatchback.”

    If the man who defined the rules can’t even make the determination, I think we need to revisit the rules again.

    1. You got my curiosity up. First thought was fuel filler cap for a tank high on the firewall, but, other pictures I found seem to show a matching carbuncle (great descriptor!) on the drinker’s side, so, nope. I got nothin’.
      I bet Rex Bennet would know!

Leave a Reply