“Such key factors of a modern car as an automatic transmission, four-wheel drive and a modern engine— but these tasks can’t be solved quickly and require serious funding,” said the CEO of AvtoVAZ, maker of the iconic Russian Lada auto brand. Lada workers wrote that their plant couldn’t restart due to the lack of components. At the moment, Russia’s best car is only 40% Russian. The rest used to be imported from abroad.

The auto industry is shaping up to be an early test case for how successfully Russian industry can recover from the greatest shock to the country’s economy since the dissolution of the USSR. Russian executives are scouring other countries for missing Western components or trying to produce them at home, a process that can take years to master. Meanwhile, they are producing cars partly based on designs decades old.

 The war is undoing decades of Western investment and know-how, heralding a period of adjustment ahead across industries. “The impact on the industry will be indicative of what awaits other sectors of the Russian economy: less technologically advanced products, poorer quality and a limited variety of goods,” said an expert in London.

To resume production of cars with anti-lock brake systems next year and electronic stability control by 2024, AvtoVAZ will need to develop its own homegrown technological capability. The development of an automatic transmission will cost about 30 billion rubles, while creating an all-wheel drive system for cars will cost another 20 billion rubles. Locked out of their main suppliers, like Bosch in Europe, Lada is turning instead to Chinese suppliers, but Chinese versions aren’t expected until next year.