Ural Automobile Plant

In 1941, by order of the USSR State Defence Committee, the ZiS automobile plant in Moscow was partly evacuated to the town of Miass in the Chelyabinsk region, where a military car repair plant was set up; it began work in spring 1942. A year later the plant was turned into an automobile plant by order of the State Defence Committee; in summer 1944 the first batch of ZiS-5V trucks left the plant. After the Second World War the plant at first built the two-axle Ural-ZiS 5M and -352 trucks based on the ZiS-5 design; in the second half of the 1950s they were replaced by the Ural-355, which looked a little like the GAZ-51. In the 1960s it was decided to re-specialise the plant in three-axle off-road trucks; the first, the Ural-375 with 6x6 drive and a 7-litre V8 petrol engine, was completed in 1961. This model remained the plant's main product for more than two decades; alongside the flatbed, tractor units and the 6x4 Ural-377 were also built. In 1977 the off-road Ural-4320 (tractor unit version 4420) with a KamAZ diesel engine went into production, replacing the petrol-engined models by the mid-1980s; in 1983 production began of the Ural-5557, an off-road tipper for agricultural use. After the collapse of the USSR close cooperation began with the Italian truck maker IVECO; in 1994 the joint venture IVECO-UralAZ was formed with UralAZ, IVECO and Gazprom, building off-road trucks with IVECO cabs. Since 2001 the Miass plant has been part of the GAZ Group; it still builds mainly off-road trucks (developments of the Ural-4320/4420/5557), plus the Ural-5323 and -6323 models using IVECO cabs.