Riga Autobus Factory

In 1955, it was renamed the Riga Experimental Bus Factory (Latvian: Rīgas eksperimentālā autobusu fabrika, Russian: Рижский Опытный Автобусный Завод), and the products started to be abbreviated to RAF.

[3] It was planned to produce passenger ("route taxis" for airports, and for sporting teams), freight, mail, and ambulance versions of the vehicle, to replace the modified estates then in use.

[2] Drawing inspiration from the VW Type 2, it had a front-mounted water-cooled 2,445 cc (149.2 cu in) engine (based on the Volga's, with a lower compression ratio), and seated ten.

[5] RAF management, in a rare move for a Soviet company, created two competing teams to individually design a new van.

However, the factory size was not large enough to put this model into mass production, and therefore it was moved to ErAZ (Yerevan, Armenia).

The factory produced several versions of the RAF-2203, which was widely sold in the Soviet Union and exported, mainly to Socialist bloc and aligned nations.

During its planning, local economists warned that the project was unfeasible in the long term, but were ignored by the Soviet government.

[10] In addition, even with the imported workforce, the factory suffered from a lack of qualified manpower: engineers (later on, also conscript soldiers of the Soviet Army) were made to work on the production line.

The original plan was to build a new RAF vehicle to be called the M1 "Roksana”, designed with help from the British consultancy International Automotive Developments.

[10] After the collapse of the USSR, the new borders broke the supply chains and production fell drastically[buzzword].

[citation needed] Although some Western and East Asian investors also showed their interest in RAF, all of them considered this investment too risky as the local economy was too small to support large production and the Russian market was virtually closed due to the volatile Russian economy and a complicated political relationship between Russia and Latvia.

[citation needed] Surviving prototypes of the plant are on display at the Riga Motor Museum, as well as production models in other institutions.

RAF-251 bus
RAF-977 minibus
RAF-2203 Latvija
RAF-22031-01 ambulance
RAF-2907 (special edition for the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow)