It was the first passenger car to be produced in the Soviet Union and is a near-exact copy of the Ford Model A from 1930.

[2] Ford was an important supplier of passenger cars and commercial vehicles such as tractors and trucks, especially in the 1910s and 1920s.

In 1929, an official contract was signed with Ford, which provided that, every year, the USSR would buy large numbers of kits for Ford models, to be assembled in the newly built Nizhny Novgorod Automobile Plant, shortened to NAZ (GAZ from 1933).

The Great Depression hit Ford, but not the Soviet Union, significantly fewer kits were needed.

[3] At about the same time, the production of the GAZ-AA began, which was a truck built on the same chassis as the car and included many other parts from it.