A Short History of the Armoured Car, from 1902 to Riga

The armoured car is older than the tank and nearly as old as the motor car. It began the way many inventions do: two engineers, in two countries, in the same spring, with the same idea.

1902: two machines in one spring

The first armoured cars that were actually built appeared within weeks of each other in 1902. The Charron, Girardot et Voigt was presented at the Brussels motor show on 8 March, with a Hotchkiss machine gun and 7 mm of armour for its gunner. Simms’ Motor War Car followed at the Crystal Palace in London in April: Vickers armour 6 mm thick, a Daimler engine and two Maxim guns in turrets that turned through a full circle. In 1904 came the Austro-Daimler Panzerautomobil, with curved plates 3 to 3.5 mm thick and a domed rotating turret. (Armored car on Wikipedia)

1909: Riga builds its first cars

The Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory, RBVZ, had built railway carriages in Riga for decades. DARTZ dates the works to 1869, and the company became a joint-stock firm in 1874. In 1909 it began building cars under the Swiss designer Julien Potterat. RBVZ’s aviation department also built aircraft, among them Igor Sikorsky’s four-engine Ilya Muromets bomber from 1913. (Russo-Balt on Wikipedia)

1913 to 1915: armour meets the Russo-Balt

Adolphe Kégresse, the engineer who ran the Tsar’s garage, designed a flexible-belt track system and patented it in 1913. He applied it to several cars, including a Russo-Balt. Citroën adopted the idea in 1921, and the American M2 and M3 half-tracks built on the same principle in the 1940s numbered more than 41,000. (Kégresse track on Wikipedia)

DARTZ dates RBVZ’s first armoured cars to 1912, the year the works began supplying cars to the Russian Army. By the war they were in service: four Russo-Balt armoured cars were used at the Battle of Przasnysz in February and March 1915 to help break the German line. In December 1914 the first Rolls-Royce armoured cars had reached the Western Front, by which time the mobile phase of the war there was already over. DARTZ also counts the Vezdekhod, a tracked armoured vehicle with a rotating turret built at the Riga works and tested on 18 May 1915, among the contenders for the world’s first tank, a claim it describes as still debated.

In the autumn of 1915, as German forces approached Riga, the automobile works were evacuated to Moscow, to the Fili district.

1922: a name for armour

In 1922 the successor to the evacuated works, the First State Armoured Vehicle Factory in Moscow, assembled an armoured car from Russo-Baltic parts. It was called Prombron’, short for Industrial Armour. The first was completed on 8 October 1922.

1988 to now: the name returns

In 1988 Leonard F. Yankelovich, the great-grandson of a minority shareholder in RBVZ, revived the heritage in Riga as DARTZ. The model name came with it. Every DARTZ Prombron’ since has been built to commission, armoured or non-armoured, in the city where the first Russo-Balt car was built.