Pontiac

Edward M. Murphy founded the Pontiac Buggy Company in Ponti­ac, Michigan, in 1893. The town had taken its name from a mighty Na­tive American chief who, 150 years before, had forged a powerful con­federation of the Ottawas, Chippewas, Pottawattomis and Miamis.

However, when Murphy decided to go into the automobile business in 1907, he called his company Oakland. It wasn't until the middle of the 1920s that the name "Pontiac" was used on a car. This was the Pontiac Six of 1926.

By then, Pontiac was part of General Motors. It remains the only company acquired by GM after its' founding to have Survived past 1940. It might have been otherwise. The Great Crash hit Pontiac especially hard, sales diving from 200,000 in 1929 to a little over 45,000 in 1932.

Certain collapse was averted by the canny policies of GM president Alfred P. Sloan, who combined Pontiac and Chevrolet manufacturing early in 1933 and saved money by sharing tooling, bodies, chassis, and other major components. What's more, he did it without seriously com­promising the characters of either division.

Character has always been an important element of Pontiac - from the almost magisterial presence and elegance of the 1950s Chieftans and Streamliners to the swagger of the finned Bonneville, and from the un­derplayed potency of the Tempest GTO to the blatant exhibitionism of' the Firebird. Pontiac has had its dull moments, but it enters the mid-'90s with a renewed sense of style and direction.

Chevrolet

Chevrolet packs more history into the first five years of its existence, than most car makers manage in a lifetime. The story starts with two men: William Crapo Durant and Louis Chevrolet.

Boston-born Durant was a Michigan-based industrialist who founded General Motors. Chevrolet was a Swiss-born mechanic and racing driver who was hired for the Buick team by Durant in 1908 as he assembled the elements for GM. In 1910, Durant's aggressive plans for rapid expansion lost him control of both Buick and the emergent GM, but he hadn't lost his burning ambition (now fueled by a determination to re­gain control of the corporate phenomenon he'd started) or the services of the talented Louis Chevrolet.

In October of the same year, having acquired a small garage on Detroit's Grand River Avenue, Durant set Chevrolet a challenge: to design and build a new car that would bear the Chevrolet name. Helping this endeavor was engineer Etienne Planche. Together they worked designs for both four and six-cylinder engines. Durant liked the look the six-cylinder design and gave the project the green light.

A press released dated May 30, 1911, disclosed the following: Durant of the General Motors company and racer Louis Chevrolet, One' of the speed wonders of the day and a co-worker with Mr. Durant in the manufacture and exploitation of fast cars, will establish a factory in Detroit W the manufacture of a new high-priced car... the Durant-Chevrolet."