Overhead Driveshaft Is the Most Brilliantly Absurd Build You'll Ever See Because Russia

One country, in particular, holds a special place on the trophy wall of the world auto industry’s monumentally nonsensical achievements. Mother Russia is by far the leader in this segment, having produced a great many automotive contraptions that defy logic, engineering, common sense, and sometimes even the internet.

Granted, this last bit has been achieved in more recent years, mainly due to the conjured and relentless efforts of a special task force of wrenching brainiacs going by the collective social media persona of Garage 54. Based far away from the rest of the car-making world, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the merry lads with a knack for anything piston have come up with yet another idea.

I can’t find an appropriate epithet for their latest deed, so I’ll open a topic in the comments about what would best describe the contraption. Their idea was this: build a driveshaft that loops over the car. Requirements: 1) Make it. 2) Make it work. 3) Make it not work by making it work at full throttle. As we can see from the video below, the Siberians’ success rate on this project hit 107% easily.

The engineering is pretty straightforward – although probably neither ‘straight’ nor ‘forward’ would be the best descriptors in this case. The obvious reason is that the never-before-seen looping driveshaft is an ‘under-over-under’ setup that leaves the gearbox in the traditional fashion but doesn’t follow the shortest possible path to the differential.

Instead, the Russians devised a driveline that exits through the floorboard where the back seat would normally be, continues into the trunk, leaves the car and jolts upward above the rear window, then arches forward over the roof, enters the engine bay right beside the block, bypasses the transmission and finally ends in the rear axle. A 400-degree (at least) loop is exactly what no carmaker in its right power stroke ever thought of.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that straight pipes don’t directly convey axial rotation on a multi-plane trajectory. It takes joints that allow the steel tubes to transfer motion while rotating. They’re called U-joints (as in universal joints), and they’re common in rear-wheel-driven automobiles, such as a Soviet-era Lada.

However, patriotic engineers from the 1960s USSR only fitted a minimal number of couplings on their driveshafts – which is one. Their internet-roaming wranglers from Garage 54 have raised that number to a nice round 24 – adding a constant-velocity joint about midway through.

That’s right, the over-the-car driveline has 24 universal joints – and that’s only because the Siberians ran out of scrapped donor cars to source more joints from. But that didn’t stop them – I wonder if there’s any mechanical challenge that could make them give up – and they built a nice subframe over the car to support the rotating assembly.

And it works – barely, but then again, no great idea started out as a full-blown blockbuster, didn’t it? The scorpion-looking Lada runs and drives – don’t ask what powertrain losses we are facing here – it’s probably ‘more-than-I-care-to-count’ percent. The build is amazing, but the engineering isn’t the most precise ever, and the coil-over driveline vibrates.

A lot. Enough to tear itself apart when the Russians give it some juice. Frankly, it’s the first time I’ve seen them taking cover from their own quirky projects – for good reason. As you can see in the video, a remotely operated throttle immediately rips the U-joints apart, sending the CV joint balls schrapnelling everywhere.

When the Lada was conceived in the 1970s, Soviet engineers installed a 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine with 76 hp (78 PS) and 86 lb-ft (117 Nm) on tap. How much of that output is lost to thin air – literally—is as relevant in this application as the color of a bicyclist’s underwear is to his top speed.

I believe that the Siberians wanted to simply go racing, and the tech inspectors told them that a driveshaft loop was mandatory. I suspect the Novosibirsk boys weren’t on the same page as the overseeing committee and took that phrase too literally.

The long-shaft spinning-mohawk overhead-drivesahft transmission is probably the greatest ground clearance life hack since portal axles, but for some vague reason (that I can’t point out), I believe this idea will not catch on. But just because something is useless doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done, and the notoriously hilarious boys from Garage 54 are living proof that no idea is too off the wall to be discarded.