The GAZ-A was the first passenger car of the Gorky Automobile Plant and the first Soviet passenger car produced on a mass scale. It was assembled from December 1932 to 1936; a total of 41,917 cars were built.[1] It was a licensed copy of the American Ford Model A, the documentation for which the plant received under a technical assistance agreement signed with the Ford Motor Company on 31 May 1929.[2]
How the car came to Nizhny Novgorod
The decision to build an automobile plant was made by the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the USSR on 4 March 1929, and on 6 April it approved the construction site near Nizhny Novgorod. The foundation stone was laid on 2 May 1930, and the plant was built in eighteen months.[2]
On 1 January 1932 the enterprise — then still the Nizhny Novgorod Automobile Plant — went into operation, and on 29 January the first truck, the GAZ-AA, rolled off the assembly line. The passenger car went into production that same December: the first GAZ-A sample was assembled on 6 December 1932.[1][2] By that time the plant had already changed its name: on 7 October 1932 Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky, and the NAZ became the Gorky Automobile Plant.[1]
Around the plant grew a Avtozavodsky District — Avtozavod, with its own company town, whose layout was designed at the same time as the plant's buildings.
Design
The car was fitted with an inline four-cylinder side-valve engine producing 40 hp at 2,200 rpm: a cast-iron block, aluminum pistons, and gravity-fed fuel supply — the design provided for neither a fuel pump nor an oil filter. The gearbox was a three-speed unit without synchromesh.[1][4]
The body was a stamped, open, four-door five-seat phaeton. The suspension was a dependent (solid-axle) type on transverse semi-elliptic leaf springs; the brakes were drum type with a mechanical cable drive; the wheels were wire-spoked, size 5.00-19. The windshield was made of three-layer glass with a plastic interlayer. The car's length was 3,874 mm, its height 1,753 mm, and its top speed 95 km/h.[1][4]
Service life and weak points
The car had been designed for American roads and wore out quickly on Soviet ones: the engine's service life did not exceed 25,000 kilometers, the running gear required repair after as little as ten thousand, and the frame and body were considered weak. The car's production cost was about 3,700 rubles.[1]
Nevertheless, it was the GAZ-A that made the plant the country's largest automobile manufacturer: on 17 April 1935 GAZ became the first in Soviet automobile manufacturing to produce its hundred-thousandth car, and that jubilee car was itself a GAZ-A.[5]
Variants and legacy
Cargo-passenger and special-purpose versions were built on the GAZ-A's base, along with the experimental streamlined GAZ-A-Aero — an early Soviet experiment with an aerodynamic body.[4]
The experience of series production of the GAZ-A directly paved the way for the plant's next passenger model — the "Emka", in developing which Gorky's designers had already moved noticeably away from the American prototype.[1]
Sources
- autohs.ru — GAZ-A: the first Soviet passenger car (archived)
- lib-avt.ru — Avtozavodsky District Library System — History of the Gorky Automobile Plant (archived)
- modeli-gaz.ru — GAZ Models — GAZ-A (archived)
- 5koleso.ru — 5 Koleso — Gorky Automobile Plant (archived)