The GAZelle is a 2-door dropside truck / 2/4-door pickup truck / 4-door panel van / 4-door minibus from GAZ, built from 1994, when airbags, anti-lock brakes and Japanese build quality became the world standard. Under the bonnet: Petrol engine.
The background
The GAZelle (Russian: ГАЗе́ль) is a series of light commercial vehicle—pickup trucks, vans and minibuses—made by Russian car manufacturer GAZ. At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and transition to a market economy, the Russian automobile industry had not produced a much-demanded LCV similar to the Ford Transit or VW T4 class. The GAZelle shares many parts with the company's passenger cars (especially GAZ-31029); in fact, models produced until 1998 had the same grille, and the engines for the Volga were still used in the GAZelle until 2010.
Riga Autobus Factory, which formerly manufactured minibuses for the whole USSR, remained in Latvia, and now required its vehicles be sold to the now-foreign Russian market for hard currency. Responding to this market opportunity, GAZ swiftly developed its own LCV called GAZelle (the name is a pun on "gazelle"), which, taken together with its lighter version, Sobol, now account for the majority of the Russian van and light truck market and have strong positions in the markets of other CIS countries, ranking as GAZ's most popular and successful products. The GAZelle's design is superficially reminiscent of the 1986 Ford Transit, but the two cars have nothing in common. It has remained very successful on the Russian market despite minimal upgrades.
The engineering
Power comes from Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. It shifts through a 5-speed manual. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Where it sits
Its family tree is legible: it took over from the RAF-2203; its successor was the Gazelle NEXT; assembly was at Nizhny Novgorod. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Audi A4, the Toyota RAV4, the Audi A6 — show what else the money bought that year. Its GAZ stablemates include the Chaika and the GAZ 24-24.