President Vladimir Putin's new limo better than Obama's 'submarine'

President Barack Obama can have his Cadillac, a “scary looking submarine,” because Russian President Vladimir Putin will soon be riding in style.

So says carmaker ZiL, the manufacturer of a new Russian-built limousine soon to transport bigwigs in that country.

Remember, this man is talking about RUSSIAN-made limos, those funny looking things you see in black-and-white images of the Soviet Motherland or old spy movies.

“We tried to preserve the generic feature of the ZiL: the recognizable style, the lighting, the mirrors,” ZiL’s Mikhail Sattarov said.

“We wanted it to be clear that this is a ZiL, not a soapbox, not a Mercedes. If you look, it’s dark blue. If you look at what Obama drives around in, it’s a scary submarine, no kind of aesthetic; it’s awful to look at.”It took ZiL six years to complete the design, and earlier this year Putin suggested Russians opt for "Made in Russia" over foreign competitors.The six-door car weighs 3.5 tons thanks mostly to a 7.7-liter engine that gets 8.57 mpg. No word if that’s city or highway.

"Producing limousines was necessary during the time of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. Why do this? It will break down and malfunction like before," Oleg Datskiv of auto-dealer.ru told Russia Today.