Detroit Diesel - how the automotive giant was created.
Detroit Diesel today is one of the world's leading factories for the production of heavy engines with a capacity of 190 hp and spare parts for them. Detroit Diesel's head office is located in Detroit, Michigan, despite the general decline of both the center of the American automotive industry, Detroit, and the automotive industry itself in the United States, which moved its main production facilities from its territory to third world countries. The headquarters of the big three Detroit companies - General Motors - are still located in Detroit; in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn is the headquarters of Ford Motor Company, and in another suburb, Auburn Hills, is the headquarters of Chrysler.But once upon a time, in the mid-1920s, Detroit was the automotive capital of the world, one of the richest cities in North America. The largest automobile factories in the USA were concentrated here. Detroit was the city of the factories of Ford, Durand, Dodge brothers, Packard and Chrysler.
Huge territories with factory and administrative buildings were truly a city within a city and even a state within a state. The factories made Detroit the world city of automobile engines, and it experienced a boom in its development, producing not only automobile engines, but also building the world's first networks of expressways and interchanges.
In the heyday of Detroit, the appearance of the new Detroit Diesel plant for the production of diesel engines was a small episode in the history of the General Motors concern, but a very significant episode, since Detroit Diesel is still the manufacturer of the most common power engines, which are equipped with the vast majority of Freightliner cars.
General Motors Corporation originated back in 1902 as a small private company of Polish immigrants, the Grabowski brothers.
The company was called Rapid Motor Vehicle and was engaged in the design of trucks with a single-cylinder engine, including for passenger transportation.Six years later, in 1908, William Durand appeared in Detroit, who since 1886 had a fairly successful company producing horse-drawn carriages. Over time, looking at the development of progress, Durand realized that the future belongs to the car. In 1903, having met the businessman J. With the help of Whiting, Durand obtained the rights to produce cars designed by D. Buick. After obtaining these rights, he rushed to buy up small car companies, many of which were unprofitable. To begin with, he brought together 23 manufacturers of cars, spare parts and accessories, including Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland, Elmore and, among others, the Grabowski brothers' quite successful Rapid Motor Vehicle company, one of the first bought by Duran in Detroit. Moreover, he buys up small car companies throughout the state of Michigan and creates a large automotive company General Motors in Detroit, which manufactures trucks, including light pickup trucks, SUVs and cargo vans. His company has been successfully developing, and since the beginning of World War I, the company has been rebuilding in a military manner and supplying more than 10 thousand trucks to the US Army.