Dartz: inside the world’s craziest car company

If you were to write a list of the great car-making nations, you’d probably run out of ink before you thought of Latvia. And yet this former Soviet republic, sandwiched between Estonia and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, has produced some truly excellent machinery. Over the past hundred years or so, the country has made tanks, trains, trucks, buses, aeroplanes, ships and even Fords, which were built under licence in the capital Riga until the Russians barged in. Today the Latvian car industry is represented by one company: Division Automobile Riga Tank Zavod. Or Dartz, to you and me.

Photography: Rowan Horncastle

This feature was originally published in Issue 282 of Top Gear magazine.

Dartz, as you may recall from previous TopGear stories, is a manufacturer of hideously expensive SUVs and armoured cars for the sort of people you really don’t want to upset. To find out more about this bulletproof corner of the car market, we planned to travel to the Dartz headquarters in Riga, interview the company executives and return with a grown-up story about the economics of super-luxury manufacturing. But Dartz doesn’t really work like that. This, for example, is the email in which its founder, Leo Yankelovich, invited us to visit his office: “You come to Riga, picture me, my office, sexiest part of my team. We make session with one of Aladeen’s virgins who will promote our Prombron Black Shark The Diktator!”

This requires some explanation, so here goes. The “Aladeen” in question is the fictional despot from Sasha Baron Cohen’s movie The Dictator, in which he was protected by an army of virgin guards. The Prombron is a Dartz SUV, favoured in the movie by Aladeen, and the Black Shark Diktator is an upcoming special edition thereof, which Leo says we’ll be the first to drive, just as soon as he’s actually made it. In the meantime, he said, we should visit Riga to, er, make session. We accepted, almost without hesitation.

And so we find ourselves on a flight with instructions to wait outside arrivals for our driver, and that’s precisely what we’re doing when a text arrives. “We approach now. Look for A-Team!” It’s Leo, who, it turns out, is in the passenger seat of an exact replica of the A-Team van, for reasons unknown to us and probably to Leo himself. He emerges wearing a toothy smile and a backwards baseball cap to cover his round and perfectly smooth head.

Now I’d like to tell you that our first sights are of a port city with upmarket streets and more cheerful architecture than most former Soviet republics, but I can’t, because we’re bundled into the van, red curtains pulled, while a former KGB agent called Igor drives us to an industrial unit somewhere. “We make van 20 years ago,” Leo says. “For party.” There were plastic cups, disco balls, and a pack of prophylactics behind a panel marked “in emergency, break glass”.

The industrial unit is Dartz’s Latvian HQ, on the site of the old Russo-Balt works where train carriages were once built. We knew there wouldn’t be many cars here, for all Dartz vehicles are made strictly to order – there are only so many £500,000 SUVs a small company can keep in stock, after all. What we weren’t expecting is that, to keep the place lively, it also doubles as a museum dedicated entirely to vodka. “Please, come in my world,” Leo announces, as we stand in the lobby, wondering if our questions about production volumes and chassis development might be slightly misplaced. “I am idiot carmaker,” he says. “So today we drink. You like garlic vodka?” It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.

Sure enough, the whole building is a shrine to potato booze, which Leo has spent the past decade stocking with thousands of bottles, most of which are now empty. Dotted around the place are various other curiosities, including mortar shells, a wood burning stove and a pair of Dennis Rodman’s shoes, beside a bottle of yellow liquid in which floats a dead cobra. Rodman, the basketballist, came here fresh from a visit to North Korea. “This snake,” says Leo, “he tried to leave Korea too, but nobody escape Baby Kim, hahaha!”

There are two things you should know about Leo: one, he doesn’t drive. Two, he once died for 22 minutes. “I was in China,” he says, “where I drink until a little bit dead. They deliver me to hospital and take trousers off, very urgent to get me back to life. Electricity. Blood. Everything. So I stopped the drink, until today, for TopGear especially.” We explain there was no need to re-murder himself on our account, but it’s too late.

Anyway, China. Despite the Chinese economy being unusually sluggish of late, its super-rich still have an enormous appetite for luxury vehicles, especially the one-of-a-kind creations offered by Dartz. “Any a**hole can make car,” he says. “But I am coachbuilder, and I make man car. But people don’t want farm truck.” That explains, sort of, why his cars no longer use GM parts, but instead use Merc’s more sophisticated GL platform and twin-turbo V8s turned up to 1,500bhp. Plenty of oomph for a quick getaway, then, should the bulletproof bodywork and anti-paparazzi shock devices not be enough.

“Will the vodka be moved aside for a slick production line?” I ask. “I don’t make car in this place,” comes the reply. “Factory is in Estonia, but moving to Germany soon, interior guy in Italy, someone in Cannes and also in USA.” In other words, Dartz is a sort of international collective with a puzzling network of partners, suppliers and franchises. Yet somehow it all works because, after all, Leo has persuaded several people to part with half a million quid or more for one of his vehicles. Some of those have been modified Range Rovers, and even a Ferrari wrapped in leather – he started in the window film and vinyl wrap business – but most were versions of the Prombron, which comes in ascending degrees of vulgarity.

Here are a few things from the options list: a kilo of caviar, a million-dollar bottle of vodka, a piece of graphic artwork featuring a strange image of an inflated Bruce Willis (a Dartz appeared in Die Hard 5), diamond-and-ruby studding, and a pair of pure gold Russian eagles. Leo has even threatened to upholster his interiors with whale penis, despite ethical protestations, which he dismisses. “Who care about penis when whale is dead?” he says.

We are then introduced to Vikki Gondelmane, head of the “Department of Opulence” and the lady responsible, at least in theory, for helping you to spec your Dartz. I tell her I quite fancied some blue alligator leather, but before she could answer, Leo does. “Crocodile, schmockodile. What you need is shark. But regarding stingray, you cannot bend it, OK?”. This is the problem with conducting serious industry interviews over several bottles of industrial-strength spirit. You just can’t have a serious discussion about which poor, exotic beast should die so that a filthy-rich oligarch can have a nicely textured dashboard. At least I didn’t have to wear a tie.

You may have noticed another person in the pictures accompanying these words. Her name is Viktoriya-Nikole, an entirely lovely local who somehow found herself playing one of Aladeen’s “virgin guards” in The Dictator, a character she reprised for our visit. Viktoriya is the official “Company Face”, and joins a team of several people with job titles more suited to a paramilitary organisation. There’s Travis De Kock (Strategical Planning Department), Boosted Boris (Minister of Propaganda and Agriculture), Ermins the Stunt Drinker (for when Leo’s being teetotal and needs someone to do shots on his behalf) and, of course, Igor (Chief of Test and Security Department).

“This is Igor cave,” says Leo as he ushers us through some camouflage netting into a back room. Inside is a desk, a few old car seats, yet more shelves of vodka, and many military artefacts. These include a balaclava of the sort worn by Crimean freedom fighters, a decommissioned Kalashnikov, and many used bullet casings. On the wall is an image of a younger, slimmer Igor, pictured during his time as a sniper in the Soviet Army during its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. After that, he joined the KGB. Then he looked after security for a Latvian bank, when he needed some armoured cars, which is how he met Leo. I dared not ask any more than this.

At least you know that when you’re sitting behind two inches of armour plating, it’s been rigorously tested by a man who’s taken his fair share of enemy fire. Because despite the comedy side of Dartz, it is genuinely respected as a maker of battle-ready cars and people actually buy them for their protective qualities. That, and the fact there’s a sex toy in the glovebox.

The rest of the day is a bit hazy, to be honest. Actually, I can remember most of it, but this is a wholesome, family outlet so I’ve left some bits to your imagination. What I can say is that our last hour with Leo is spent driving around in the A-Team van singing along to YouTube videos of Slade, his favourite band in the whole world. Then, as we say our goodbyes, Leo offers one more piece of wisdom. “Remember,” he says, “Noddy Holder is a gangster.” And with that, the door slams, Igor guns the engine and they’re gone.