Riga Bus Factory

Founded in 1954, the company first built the RAF-251 bus on the GAZ-51 truck chassis. The story of Latvian-built minibuses, however, begins with the RAF-10, built in 1957–1959 on the units of the GAZ-20 Pobeda car. The next model, the RAF-977, was based on GAZ-21 Volga engineering and, modernised along the way, stayed on the assembly line for almost two decades (1959–1976); its general body shape lived on into the 1990s in the JerAZ vans built in Armenia. The first new-type RAF-2203 minibuses were built in 1975 at the plant, which had meanwhile moved to Jelgava; at the end of the 1980s it was replaced by the thoroughly modernised RAF-22038. The main units of the last two were naturally borrowed from the Volga models GAZ-24 and GAZ-24-10.