ZAZ Zaporozhets (Ukrainian: Запоро́жець) was a series of subcompact cars designed and built from 1958 at the ZAZ factory in Soviet Ukraine (Ukrainian: Запорізький автомобільний завод "Zaporizkyi Avtomobilnyi Zavod", or Zaporizhian Automobile Factory). Different types of Zaporozhets were produced until 1994.
The name Zaporozhets means a Cossack of the Zaporizhian Sich. It can also mean а man from Zaporizhia oblast.
Zaporozhets is still warmly remembered in many ex-USSR countries. Like the Volkswagen Beetle or East Germany's Trabant, Soviet Zaporozhets was destined to become a "people's car". It was the cheapest Soviet car and so the most affordable to common people. At the same time, it was rather sturdy and well suited to Soviet roads. They were known for good crossing performance on poor roads; better, than bigger Soviet passenger cars. Their advantage was also ease of repairs. The very looks of this car gave birth to several nicknames that stuck with it forever: horbatyi ("hunchback", due to ZAZ-965 insect-like form; ZAZ factory workers never used this nickname), malysh (English: Kiddy), vukhastyi ("big-eared", due to air intakes on sides to cool down the engine in the rear of the ZAZ-966/968), mylnitsa ("soap-box", for ZAZ-968M, lacking "ears").
All Zaporozhets cars featured rear wheel drive (with engine in the rear) and aircooled engines.
Numerous special versions of Zaporozhets were equipped with additional sets of controls that allowed operating the car with a limited set of limbs or completely by hands, and were given for free or with big discounts to the disabled people, especially war veterans, as an alternative to SMZ-series microcars (such variants reached at times up to 20% of ZAZ output).