Continued from “BILLY’ DURANT; THE MAN WHO BUILT GENERAL MOTORS, LOST IT, THEN TOOK IT BACK AGAIN – PART TWO. Defeated over the voting trust, the board was now quickly reorganized, with Pierre S. DuPont as chairman of the board. Though the $50 dividend idea had been the banks’ defense against Durant – a battle…
Continued from “BILLY” DURANT: THE MAN WHO BUILT GENERAL MOTORS, LOST IT, THEN TOOK IT BACK AGAIN – PART ONE. In 1910, when Durant had been in charge, General Motors had been poised for dominance of the automobile market with models offered in every price range. General Motors had held 21% of the new car…
In 1916, Chevrolet bought General Motors. That’s right: Chevrolet bought General Motors, not General Motors bought Chevrolet. This is how that happened. William C. (“Billy”) Durant founded General Motors. Durant was originally in business as the Durant-Dort Carriage Company manufacturing carriages. He was a forward thinker with imagination and early saw the potential of automobile…
It is, if you believe Jim Farley, president of Ford Motor Company. He says the forthcoming all-electric Fathom four door pickup – to be introduced at a starting price with mandatory destination charge totaling $29,945 – is Ford’s new “Model T moment,” a vehicle Ford reportedly believes will sell more than 100,000 vehicles in the…
There is a popular myth that automobile designers exist primarily to gull consumers into becoming dissatisfied with their old cars and convince them to needlessly spend money buying new ones. That designers are fulfilling consumers’ desires seems not to occur to the critics. But the right designer at the right time can do more than…
It began by describing her: “Somewhere west of Laramie, there’s a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about . . . the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp.” The car was described only as an enhancement of her style: “There’s a…
Some parts for vehicles that are older, but not that old – as well as for vehicles old enough to qualify for collector plates – are discontinued and seem to be impossible to find. Though the United States fleet average age has been increasing every year, parts availability is not keeping pace with the longer…
The customer was 19 years old. He wrote to Harold Ames, the sales manager at Duesenberg. He proposed trading in his Model A Ford on a new Duesenberg and included his ideas for how the new car should be designed. Nothing in the letter suggested its author possessed the financial means to purchase a Duesenberg,…
“Royal Bobcat.” The name is a legend to those steeped in Pontiac performance of the halcyon days of the 1960’s, a time when Pontiac was the performance brand, on the strip and on the street. It was also a time when Royal Pontiac of Royal Oak, Michigan, was the dealer that made fast Pontiacs faster….
MACAULEY’S GHOST KILLS PACKARD’S LAST CHANCE Barely five years after Packard invested in a new plant to manufacture bodies for the One Twenty, Macauley was outsourcing body production for the Clipper to Briggs Manufacturing Company. Although this was justified at the time as an expedient to get the car into production because Packard’s own facilities…