Crossover vehicles have taken the modern automotive landscape by storm, with many crediting different cars as the original disruptors. From the AMC Eagle to the Jeep Cherokee to the Subaru Outback, cars in the western world have been crossing category lines for decades, but I just learned about a mid-1950s Soviet-era car that predates them all. It’s called the GAZ M-72, and it blended the unibody structure from GAZ’s sedan with a true off-road ready four-wheel-drive system. It was a four-wheel-drive sedan that came decades before Audi introduced its Quattro to the world, too.
The GAZ M-72 came nine years after the unibody sedan it was based upon, the M20 Pobeda, which translates to “victory.” The first Soviet carmaker GAZ, actually an acronym that stands for Gorkovsky avtomobilny zavod or Gorky Automobile Plant, took its svelte Pobeda sedan and fitted it with the four-wheel-drive system from its military GAZ-69 to offer the comforts of a car with the all-terrain capability needed to conquer Russia’s unforgiving terrain.
More totally useful facts about the GAZ M-72
Particularly in the U.S., Russian and Soviet cars don’t spend much time in the spotlight, but once I learned of the GAZ M-72’s existence, I had to know more. It was meant to offer buyers the capability to traverse all of Russia’s unforgiving terrain while also offering the comforts of a traditional car. It was only produced from 1955 to 1958 in GAZ’s Gorky manufacturing plant in modern day Nizhny Novgorod, and according to Auto Evolution, just 4,677 units were built.
In its transition from traditional sedan to all-terrain vehicle, GAZ added 14 panels to strengthen the platform’s floor, doors, and roof. Sources say that during the development of the car, GAZ had to decide whether to use a 61 horsepower inline-six engine, or a 49 horsepower inline four, but Stalin preferred the four cylinder, so it became the M20 Pobeda’s powerplant.
By 1955 when the four-wheel-drive M-72 entered production, that engine output had increased to a whopping 53 horsepower that was sent to all four wheels through a three-speed manual transmission. It was priced at 16,000 Rubles, making it too expensive for most citizens, so they were mostly sold to government organizations and officials.
Beyond that, online details about the GAZ M-72 are slim, but hopefully that adds a bit of Russian classic car knowledge to your repertoire of other totally useful factoids.
