A seven-seater sedan with a monocoque body was produced at the Gorky Automobile Plant from 1949 to 1960. The copy, located in the collection of the Moscow Transport Museum, entered it in 2000. The car was in unsatisfactory condition. After a full cycle of restoration work, it will take its place in the museum’s exhibition on Novoryazanskaya Street.
ZIM became a symbol of its era, occupying a niche between the relatively mass-produced M-20 Pobeda passenger car, which was also produced by GAZ, and the government car ZIS-110, which was manufactured in Moscow, the museum said in a statement.
Designing the GAZ-12 sedan with a spacious rear sofa and two folding strap-on seats took less than two and a half years. In order to complete the task in a short time, engineers under the leadership of GAZ chief designer Andrei Lipgart tried to make maximum use of the existing developments, and the prototype body of the future ZIM, on which the units were tested, was an elongated Pobeda body.
ZIM became the first car with three rows of seats and at the same time with a monocoque body. In 1951, as part of state tests, three copies of ZIM covered more than 20 thousand km. with full load.
In the USSR, the ZIM car was sold to citizens for personal use, but few could afford it: this car cost 35-40 thousand rubles, while the price of the Pobeda was 16 thousand rubles and the Moskvich was 8-9 thousand rubles.
Motor magazine wrote in detail about the history of ZIM and its technical features.
