1939 GAZ M1
The GAZ M1 (”Emka”) was a passenger car produced by the Russian automaker GAZ between 1936 and 1943 at their plant in Gorky (the name of the city reverted to Nizhniy Novgorod in 1990).
During the Great Patriotic War an individual copies were assembled from existing inventory of parts.
The car had subsequently become an icon of its time in Russia, played an important role in the military years, as it was one of the most popular models of a passenger car in the country and was widely used by the army as staff cars.
The car was based on a popular American automobile Ford Model B of 1934 manufacturing year (40A body) with an in-line 4-cylinder engine (it is the same which was produced in Germany - Ford Rheinland). The documents on the car were surrendered to the GAZ by an American party according to the Contract terms.
The letter “M” in the model index appeared because the plant began to bear the name of the then government head of the USSR (the Chairman of the Sovnarkom) – Vyacheslav Mihkailovich Molotov, and “1” was an ordinal number of the model. The letter “M” remained in the designation of the production up to 60ies (Molotov was excluded from the party in 1962 and pensioned off in 1963).
The first trial models GAZ-M-1 was unveiled in February of 1935. The car replaced the GAZ-A in the serial production in 1936. Two first production cars rolled off the line of Gorky automobile plant (zavod) on the 16 of March, and from the 20 of May their mass production started, which amounted to 2,524 cars by the end of the year. A major novelty of the car became an all-metal body (but initially the top part of the roof was coated with synthetic “leatherette” fabric), created in the cooperation with the company Ford under the terms of the ten-year technology sharing agreement.
During the Great Patriotic War an individual copies were assembled from existing inventory of parts.
The car had subsequently become an icon of its time in Russia, played an important role in the military years, as it was one of the most popular models of a passenger car in the country and was widely used by the army as staff cars.
The car was based on a popular American automobile Ford Model B of 1934 manufacturing year (40A body) with an in-line 4-cylinder engine (it is the same which was produced in Germany - Ford Rheinland). The documents on the car were surrendered to the GAZ by an American party according to the Contract terms.
The letter “M” in the model index appeared because the plant began to bear the name of the then government head of the USSR (the Chairman of the Sovnarkom) – Vyacheslav Mihkailovich Molotov, and “1” was an ordinal number of the model. The letter “M” remained in the designation of the production up to 60ies (Molotov was excluded from the party in 1962 and pensioned off in 1963).
The first trial models GAZ-M-1 was unveiled in February of 1935. The car replaced the GAZ-A in the serial production in 1936. Two first production cars rolled off the line of Gorky automobile plant (zavod) on the 16 of March, and from the 20 of May their mass production started, which amounted to 2,524 cars by the end of the year. A major novelty of the car became an all-metal body (but initially the top part of the roof was coated with synthetic “leatherette” fabric), created in the cooperation with the company Ford under the terms of the ten-year technology sharing agreement.
