Anti-corrosion treatment of the Lada Granta is mandatory, like any domestically produced car, despite the excellent performance characteristics of the vehicle: reliability, practicality, and efficiency.
About 30% of the car's parts are made of special alloys, but there are weak points in the Lada. These are the bottom, doors, hollow elements, welding joints. To avoid damage, you need to apply a special coating to such places.
Where does the anti-corrosion treatment process begin?
— We start by assessing the general condition of the body, put the car on a lift, remove all the plastic protection, dismantle everything unnecessary in order to carefully check the condition of the bottom, side members, arches, frame and other things. We draw up an assessment report, a rust map - if it has already appeared. If there are problems with the condition of the body, then after a preliminary discussion with the owner of the car, we send it for body repair. Sometimes welding is required. If the integrity of the body is lost, there is no point in doing treatment.
Main causes of corrosion
Lada Granta is a new AvtoVAZ car based on the Lada Kalina platform. The design of the car has been carefully worked out, the number of parts in different components of the car has been reduced, and the air intakes in the front bumper have been enlarged. The good quality, convenience and reliability of the car allow it to be used even in difficult weather conditions.
The condition of highways and the various preparations with which road services treat them cause corrosion of the car body in a short period of time, and the appearance of the car is also lost. Main causes of corrosion:
- improper care;
- poor quality factory coating;
- complex car design;
- operation in difficult conditions.
To increase the service life of cars, it is necessary to protect the body from adverse weather conditions, and it is not necessary to wait for obvious signs of corrosion to appear, but to do the coating earlier.
Give some advice to car enthusiasts who have decided to undergo anti-corrosion treatment?
— Choose those anti-corrosion protection compounds that do not completely harden and remain elastic, especially for covering the bottom and arches. If the coating has become completely hard, then the protection has weakened. Microcracks will appear and any, even small, mechanical impact can destroy the entire protection. Condensation will form under the coating and corrosion will form even faster, but it will be more difficult to remove.
— Of course, we recommend contacting specialists both for the choice of compositions and for the processing itself. Good specialists are interested in you coming to them and recommending them to your car enthusiast friends. Therefore, they will select and use for you the highest quality compounds, of which there are a great many on the shelves, and not everyone will understand what is best for their car.
— The main advice, of course, is the recommendation to carry out anti-corrosion treatment even before the first signs of corrosion appear. Of course, all traces of rust will be removed, and the anticorrosive agent will stop this process. However, it’s like with an incurable disease - once it has appeared, it will be impossible to get rid of it forever. It is better to take preventive measures and prevent its occurrence.
Let's sum it up
There are many reasons why you can purchase a Grant, but there are no fewer reasons why you should refuse such a purchase. On the one hand, this car is one of the cheapest on the market, and also offers good ride comfort, a large trunk, and a relatively interesting interior design. On the other hand, we can recall the many childhood illnesses that force people to contact the service. But remember that for the first 100,000 kilometers or three years you will drive under the protection of a good warranty service.
VAZ service will help you fix all problems that arise free of charge. If you need a car mainly for city trips, Lada Granta is one of the good solutions. In particular, looking at a car through the prism of price, you begin to understand that childhood illnesses can be transferred or cured, but otherwise you definitely won’t be able to buy a new car for that kind of money. What do you think about the childhood illnesses of the Lada Granta?
Information from official representatives of AvtoVAZ
At the concern's factories, metal body elements are treated with a layer of galvanization. The low cost of the car does not allow covering the entire metal area; they protect the most vulnerable areas susceptible to corrosion:
• doors;• rear fenders;• rear wheel wells;• luggage compartment lids;• body protective screen;• floor;• protective cover;• frame parts;• rear fender groove.
The main vital structural elements are treated with a coating, which eliminates the question of whether the body of the Lada Grant is galvanized or not.
Factory galvanizing methods
Discussions about domestically produced cars do not subside. They argue about the Lada Granta, whether the body is galvanized, how the price corresponds to the quality, meanwhile the giant AvtoVAZ continues its strategy of improving the cars it produces and improving galvanization as well.
The factories use the following coating methods:
• thermal galvanizing – the most reliable;
• galvanization, when zinc is deposited from a solution on the surface of parts under the influence of electric current;
• coating with a primer with preliminary application of manganese, zinc and iron salts to the metal surface.
Myth 2: A galvanized body does not rust.
Chromium, which is part of stainless steel or applied to the surface of galvanized steel, really effectively protects its surface from corrosion. But the fact is that car bodies are not made of stainless steel, the parts of which are simply difficult to weld together due to the presence of zinc.
Therefore, factories perform galvanic galvanization, as a result of which a layer of zinc up to 0.015 mm thick is formed on the surface of the steel. This zinc layer is quite economical in terms of production costs and provides good protection. However, it is easily damaged mechanically. And not only as a result of an accident, but also due to abrasive effects on the surface of the body.
Also, the zinc layer is damaged during operation, during which the body experiences various bending and deforming loads. Because of them, corrosion first appears at welding points and at joints - numerous power and moving elements of any body. Therefore, even a good galvanized body will never benefit from additional anti-corrosion protection.
Dealers' opinion
The only remark is that some AvtoVAZ dealers in the capital honestly state that their product does not have a galvanized body at all. This is due to the low price of the car. Therefore, you need to be especially careful when choosing a car and check the manufacturer’s promises in practice.
If there is no galvanization as such, then it will be necessary to use additional semi-liquid protective agents that are applied to the metal surfaces of the car. They significantly increase the corrosion resistance of even those vehicles that have not been subjected to additional anti-corrosion treatment.
For two months my vehicle was a Lada Granta in the Norma configuration. During this time, we covered about 4,000 km, of which more than half the car was operated in run-in mode. I drove along good asphalt roads, overcame broken-down sections of concrete, tested the car on the ground, and even managed to drive on snow and ice. In general, I have accumulated impressions, it’s time to share.
Especially for this post, I made a fairly detailed photo review of the model, which I used to break up the story. Large images - with a resolution of 2000 pixels in width, consider a “grenade”
