Model AA - the beginning of the beginnings of the Gorky brand, the first car mastered at that time by the Nizhny Novgorod Automobile Plant. From the first copies built on January 29, 1932 to December of the same year, the truck was called NAZ-AA, but it met its mass production as GAZ-AA, and entered the mass consciousness and history of the country under the comprehensive nickname "lorry". In the word that there was both the carrying capacity, and the stickiness of the movements of the "crooked starter", and the familiar attitude to the entrusted technique, which she endured.
By and large, nothing new - GAZ-AA was a licensed copy of the Ford truck of the same name of the 1927 model, the release of which in 1932 was already coming to an end. A spar frame, a cast iron 40-horsepower 3.28 liter engine, a "gravity" power supply system, a four-speed gearbox, a mechanical brake drive, a transverse spring at the front and an exotic cantilever suspension at the rear. For the Ford experiments of the twenties - both for this suspension and for the transmission with the cardan closed in the pushing pipe - GAZ-AA paid with a modest chassis resource. However, the engine, unpretentious to fuel and oils, could work in the most difficult conditions. Like the Fords, the GAZ car and truck were unified in terms of the engine, steering, electrical equipment, radiator grille, hood, engine panel with a dashboard and a gas tank.
Released in dozens of specialized versions, Ford-AA did not have just a universal body - a platform with high folding sides, suitable for transportation of bulk and bulky cargo, passengers and personnel. Ford had no intention of transporting personnel at all. And, in fact, the first independent development of the engineers of the technical department of NAZ was precisely the wooden cargo platform for the AA model. It is this side body that will then bear the systemic burdens of industrialization and the main transport load in the first two years of the Great Patriotic War. Even by 1944, the lorry remained the only supplier and evacuator of besieged Leningrad. Only her and keeping the spring Ladoga ice. By that time, an extremely simplified one - without front brakes, reverse gear, doors and one headlight - the lorry was honestly plowing kilometers of front-line driven roads. And it is perfectly legitimate that it was she, one of the few models laid down by the state, who entered Berlin with the victorious army in 1945. So the delivery car, in essence, surpassed itself, its time, and even more so its prototype.
GAZ-AA (it was also called "2A") became the basis for a whole family of trucks and special vehicles, buses and armored vehicles, for a variety of experimental designs, which were based on solutions that justified themselves for decades to come. With the modernization in 1938, the truck became known as GAZ-MM.
From 1932 to 1938, 409,985 GAZ-AA cars were produced at the Gorky Automobile Plant and its branch, the Moscow Automobile Assembly Plant named after KIM. Taking into account the MM model, until 1949, GAZ produced 829,808 one and a half. Another 35 thousand of these cars were produced in 1939-1940 by the car assembly plant in Rostov-on-Don.Produced 1939-1942. Its another GAZ-AA based truck but its able to use liquified gas instead of gasoline.
