Russian Taz Driving 2

The title is a joke that does not survive translation. Таз — taz — is the Russian word for a washbasin, and as slang it means a Lada: a pun on ВАЗ, the factory that builds them, bent towards the word for a cheap piece of pressed tin. So the game is not called Russian Taz Driving because of a Tasmanian devil. It is called Russian Rustbucket Driving, and the car on the title screen — a rusty VAZ-2105 with the wheel arches cut open and a spoiler bolted to the boot — is exactly the machine the joke is about.

What you get for it is the least demanding driving game on this site. No lap, no timer, no cash, no garage, no unlock tree, no fail state. You pick one of five cars, a hangar door opens onto a grey Russian street, and the game stops asking anything of you. Nothing in it can be completed and nothing in it can be lost.

That sounds like an absence, and for thirty seconds it is. Then you find the handbrake. The streets carry no traffic at all, which turns a whole city into a skidpad, and the cars are heavy, softly sprung and rear-driven — set one up right and it will hold a slide across an entire junction. That is the game: a physics toy with a Soviet paint job, plus a slow-motion toggle for watching the drift again.

It was published on 4 November 2020 by G55.CO, a studio that has left almost no trace beyond the copyright line on its own title screen. It reached Y8 five days later and has been played 218,919 times there for an 8.5 out of 10; Gamaverse has it at 4.3 out of 5 from 472 votes.

"Taz" is Russian slang for a Lada, and the whole game is that one word

Wiktionary lists three senses for таз. A basin, the wide shallow kind you wash clothes in. The pelvis. And the one that matters here: a Lada automobile — an alteration of ВАЗ (VAZ) influenced by the noun for basin, with the implied sense of a low-tech metal item, a rustbucket.

VAZ stands for Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod, the Volga Automobile Plant, today AvtoVAZ. Its first car, the VAZ-2101, went on sale in 1970 out of a purpose-built factory in Tolyatti on the Volga, and it was a Fiat 124 built under licence — with 800 modifications to survive Soviet roads and Soviet winters. At home it was the Zhiguli, named for the hills above the river beside the plant. For export the name had to go, because Zhiguli sounded too much like zhigolo; the replacement, Lada, was picked in September 1971 through a competition in the motoring magazine Za Rulyom.

The car that came out of that stayed in production for four decades. The VAZ-2105 alone ran thirty years and close to three million units, and the last of the family left Tolyatti in September 2012. Counted together, the Fiat 124 derivatives are the third best-selling single-generation car platform in the world, behind only the Volkswagen Beetle and the Ford Model T.

Which is why the word cuts both ways. A taz is a joke about a car that rusts and leaks. It is also a joke about the car that put a country on wheels, that half its population learned to drive in, and that people are still cutting arches into and dropping onto steel wheels — exactly like the one on this game's title screen.

The five cars are real VAZ models, and the build says so

Browser driving games usually invent their cars to dodge licensing. This one did not bother: the asset names inside the Unity build spell out what you are looking at — VAZ2105, 2106_optik, vaz_2170_priora and color_niva.

• The VAZ-2105 is the Zhiguli / Lada Riva saloon, and here it is the tuned one — rusty red, wide arches, boot spoiler, steel wheels. It is the car on the loading screen and the car the title is about.
• The VAZ-2106 is its slightly plusher sibling from the same Fiat-derived family. Two of the five are classic Zhiguli saloons; one wears a Soviet-format number plate, the other a racing number.
• The Lada Priora (VAZ-2170) is the modern one, a front-drive saloon, and it is the car in the race livery.
• The Lada Niva (VAZ-2121) is the odd one out and the most interesting. Launched in 1977, it was the first mass-produced off-roader in the world built with a unibody instead of a separate chassis. Every crossover on the road today descends from that idea.

A city with nothing to do in it, and why that works

Once nothing is being scored, every stretch of road turns into a question of what happens if. Take the roundabout flat. Jump the kerb. Reverse the length of the boulevard. No punishment, no reward, so the only feedback left is the physics — which is the thing you came for.

The empty streets are load-bearing in that. There is no traffic in Russian Taz Driving 2 — not thin traffic, none — so no crash can interrupt a slide. In almost every other free-roam driving game, the AI cars exist mainly to end your fun.

The population it does have is the gopniks, men in tracksuits dancing or squatting on the pavement, and that is not a random art choice. The gopnik is a real Russian and Ukrainian street subculture, and both of its trademarks are on screen before you have driven a metre. The Adidas tracksuit became the uniform because it was what the Soviet team wore at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and the squat — the Slav squat of a thousand memes — is traced to Soviet prison culture, where you learned not to sit on cold ground.

Russian Taz Driving vs Russian Taz Driving 2

The first game arrived on Y8 in September 2019 and has been played more than a million times there for an 8.2. It is a different kind of game, and the giveaway is the key list.

	Russian Taz Driving	Russian Taz Driving 2
Y8 tags	3D, Car, Simulation	3D, Car, Drifting, Racing
Cars	6, including a police car	5
Handbrake	No — just a brake	Yes, Space
Turn signals	Q and E	Gone
Record and replay your drive	R and P	Gone
Slow motion	No	Yes

Those first-game keys are a tell. Both games run on Realistic Car Controller, a Unity physics kit whose class names — RCC_CarControllerV3, RCC_Settings, RCC_Skidmarks — are still readable inside this build, along with its stock bindings for indicators and its replay recorder. The 2019 game shipped the kit close to stock and played like a driving-school simulator. The sequel switched all of that off, turned on the handbrake and the drift physics, and pointed the whole thing at one activity. Whether that is an upgrade depends on which of the two you wanted.

Playing Russian Taz Driving 2 unblocked at school

There is no installer, no plugin, no account and no launcher — it is one HTML5 page that runs inside this one. If the site loads, the game loads.

Two honest warnings that no other page will give you. This is a 40 MB Unity WebGL download with real 3D in it, so on a shared school connection the loading bar is slow and on an old Chromebook the frame rate will not be kind. And it does not work on phones or tablets at all — the build is a fixed 960×600 with no touch controls. On a Chromebook or a laptop you are fine. On a phone, do not bother.

More driving games worth your time

If what you liked was the freedom, Cyber Truck Drive Simulator is the other open-ended driving toy in the catalogue — same idea, angular electric pickup instead of a Zhiguli.

If the missing finish line turned out to be the problem, try the opposite. Superbike Hero runs a four-race championship over real World Superbike circuits, Stock Car Hero is door-to-door oval and street racing, and Grand Prix Hero is open-wheel. All three are by b10b, and all three keep score.

Everything else with a steering wheel is in the driving category.

1. Wait out the loading. Roughly 40 MB of Unity build, so expect half a minute of logo, then a GameMonetize interstitial with a Skip Ad button once you press PLAY NOW.
2. Pick a car with the arrows. Left and right cycle five machines on a turntable; Select drops you into the world. All five are unlocked, so choose on looks.
3. Drive out of the hangar. WASD or the arrow keys. The open roller door leads straight onto the street.
4. Use Space. The handbrake is the only key that turns this from a driving simulator into a game.

Five things worth knowing:

• The Change Car button is in the world, not in a menu. It sits in the bottom-left corner while you drive, so you can swap machines from wherever you parked without reloading anything.
• Press C and use the cockpit view. These cars have modelled interiors — dashboard, pedals, door cards — which is unusual for a browser game and completely wasted from the default chase camera.
• Turn in early, pull the handbrake, then steer out of it. These are rear-drive saloons on soft springs. Grab Space in the corner and you spin; unsettle the car before the corner and you drift it.
• The slow-motion toggle exists, but the game never tells you the key. It is in the build's own key map and every site that hosts the game mentions it, yet nothing on screen names it. Try unassigned letters while you are moving.
• The gopniks are physics objects. The dancers on the pavement ragdoll when you clip them, which is the closest thing here to a scoring system.