BELAZ plant

Belarusian Automobile Plant was founded in 1948 in accordance with the Law on the Five-Year Plan for the Restoration of the National Economy of the BSSR in the city of Zhodino. In May 1950, the first products of the plant were produced: containers for transporting peat, tedders for drying it, etc., and already in November 1951, the peat engineering plant was renamed the «Dormash» reclamation and road machinery plant, which produced snow blowers, watering machines, auger machines, brush cutters and other equipment.

On April 17, 1958, the enterprise received the name Belarusian Automobile Plant. The first dump truck to roll off the assembly line of the Belarusian Automobile Plant by November 7, 1958 was the MAZ-525, the first MAZ-525 dump truck to roll off the assembly line of the Belarusian Automobile Plant, developed by the designers of the Minsk Automobile Plant. In less than one year, the Belarusian Automobile Plant created a fundamentally new dump truck with a carrying capacity of 27 tons BELAZ-540, a prototype of which was released in September 1961.

In 1965, without stopping production, the enterprise made the transition to serial production of the 27-ton BELAZ-540 dump truck, which became the ancestor of a whole family of heavy-duty dump trucks, and since 1967 it mastered the production of the 40-ton BELAZ-548A dump truck, designed taking into account the maximum possible unification of the main components and parts of the two machines.

New progressive solutions incorporated into the design of the first machines made it possible to further improve the components and systems of dump trucks of all classes of load capacity, introduce new components and materials, stage-by-stage modernize dump trucks with the creation of new modifications based on the use of diesel engines, transmissions and tires produced by various companies.

The range of dump trucks produced by the Belarusian Automobile Plant was replenished in 1994 with a new generation vehicle - the 55-ton BELAZ-7555 dump truck, which not only organically absorbed all the advantages of traditional BelAZ equipment, but and acquired new qualities that distinguish it favorably from its predecessors.

Tests of the new dump truck in difficult quarry conditions confirmed the correctness of the technical solutions and the high performance properties of the new machine. In 1996, the company began producing another promising model - the BelAZ-75131 dump truck with a lifting capacity of 130 tons.

In September 2005, the Belarusian Automobile Plant produced a prototype of the BELAZ-75600 mining dump truck with a carrying capacity of 320 tons. Only recently, BELAZ has developed and manufactured pilot production batches of 90-ton BELAZ-75570 mining dump trucks with a 6+1 GMP. Based on the main components of the 320-ton truck, the BELAZ-75601 mining dump truck with a lifting capacity of 360 tons was developed. A prototype of this dump truck was manufactured for the 50th anniversary of the chief designer's office, which the company celebrated in April 2010.

In total, in the entire history of the enterprise, the Belarusian Automobile Plant has developed more than 600 modifications of mining dump trucks with a carrying capacity from 27 to 360 tons, produced more than 130 thousand units of mining dump trucks, which in the entire history of the enterprise were sent to more than 70 countries of the world.