Man Buys Rare Soviet Chaika Ambulance, Restores It to Previous Glory

A vehicle one step down from the ZIL limousine, the Chaika is a luxury automobile from the Soviet Union created by GAZ. As limousine-class car, these were available only to the Soviet government and could not be purchased by average citizens. Even rarer were the models designed as ambulances, which is exactly what this Ukrainian found and restored.

Word in the industry is that the Soviet GAZ-13 “Chaika” model in question only came in about 20 issues, even though we can’t tell for sure. Point is, these babies were for the few, which means that any item is a true collectable. At least that is what this guy from Ukraine believes, since spend a lot of time to find one. When he finally managed to get one, he spent what ever he had and invested it in restoring the car to its previous glory.

Just imagine that most of the cars in those days, and we’re talking about the 1960s soviet period, were mass production VAS Lada vehicles that usually came with an 0.8-liter, 4 cylinder engines. Meanwhile these luxury limousines were packing a powerful V8, 5.5-liter engine and were driven through a push-button automatic transmission of a similar design to the Chrysler TorqueFlite unit.

The vintage 1950s-style 13 were later replaced by the more modern Chaika 14. Introduced in 1977, the exterior design was inspired from the 1968 and 1972 Mercury Marquise, while the interior design was similar from Mercedes-Benz W116.

Getting back to the soviet luxury ambulance in question, we have to say the interior is quite creepy. In fact, it made us think of that horror 1990 movie The Ambulance with Eric Roberts, when the main character struggles to get his girlfriend back after she was kidnapped by this weird ambulance driver.

In the movie, it turns out the ambulance was taking people to this weird facility where them would be subjected to some really odd experiments.

Soviet GAZ-13 “Chaika” - photo gallery