Amazing cars

In the 1780s, the famous Russian inventor Ivan Kulibin worked on a car project (in a certain sense of the word, more likely a cycle car, with pedal drive). In 1791, he made a scooter wagon in which he used a flywheel, brake, gearbox, rolling bearings, etc.

Cars appeared in Russia at the end of the 19th century (the first foreign car appeared in Russia in 1891, it was brought from France by the publisher and editor of the newspaper Odessa Listok V.V. Navrotsky from France by boat). The first Russian car was created by Yakovlev and Frese in 1896 and is shown at the All-Russian exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod. Subsequently, a whole series of cars and trucks were produced in small series in Russia, most of which were licensed versions of foreign designs assembled partially or completely from foreign spare parts. For example, Russo-Balt assembled 10 automobiles in 1910 and 140 in 1914. However, the mass production of motor vehicles in Russia did not begin completely independent before the revolution: its formation almost entirely took place during the Soviet period.

AMO-F-15 - the first Soviet truck, mass-produced by the AMO plant in Moscow.

Mass motorization on the territory of modern Russia began relatively late - in fact, with the commissioning of the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) automobile plant in 1932, the first to begin large-scale (design capacity - up to 300,000 cars per year) production of cars (GAZ-A) and trucks ( GAZ-AA) models licensed by the American company Ford, designed to work in the national economy. The very first mass-produced passenger cars intended for individual use were launched into the series only after the country's industrialization was completed, just before the Great Patriotic War (KIM-10).

In the post-war years, the emergence of massive quantities of personal cars became a fait accompli thanks to the large number of captured and repaired cars imported from Germany and mainly brought into personal use by the middle and senior command personnel of the Red Army, the Soviet and party nomenclature, and the upper layers of the technical and creative intelligentsia. And already in 1946, the production of a mass subcompact, intended for sale to the public, “Moskvich”, was begun. The appearance of the first original design of the Soviet passenger car - the “Victory” GAZ-M-20 — dates back to the same time. These domestically produced cars quickly replaced the “trophy” fleet, releasing on the scale of the order of tens of thousands a year, which already in the 1950s was not enough to cover the increasing demand from the population as the country's post-war economic recovery — this is one situation or another degrees persisted throughout the Soviet period. In the mid-1950s, they were replaced on the conveyor by more advanced developments - Moskvich-402 and Volga, which were widely exported. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the first attempt was made to create affordable amazing cars, which was supposed to be the Zaporozhets ZAZ-965 - however, this project can be considered successful only partly because of a number of related technical and technological problems. The first truly massive private cars in the USSR were Zhiguli cars, starting with the VAZ-2101 model, produced in quantities of more than half a million cars a year.

In the period after 1945, the USSR became a prominent global manufacturer of cars and one of the largest manufacturers of trucks and buses. In the 1950s and the first half of the 1970s, the Soviet automobile industry almost completely covered the various needs of the national economy, minimizing the purchase of motor vehicles abroad, and the task of saturating the domestic market for personal cars was gradually solved. Soviet cars and trucks in large quantities were delivered to many countries and almost all regions of the world, including Western Europe and North America. Nevertheless, due to a number of unsuccessful management decisions, as well as systemic problems that are characteristic of both the industry and the country's economy as a whole, starting in the mid-1970s, the domestic automobile industry gradually began to slide into a state of permanent crisis. Over the 1970s, not one of the Soviet automobile manufacturing plants experienced a complete change of generations of manufactured models, despite the fact that overseas it was during this period that the industry was very actively developing. Some recovery observed in the 1980s was replaced by another decline in the 1990s, which finally fixed the technological lag behind foreign manufacturers by 10-20 or more years, and attempts to create new enterprises in this area that were not connected by continuity with those founded in the Soviet era, leading the production of their own unique models in a full cycle;