Oldsmobile produced several old-school car models
, but getting the first Oldsmobile manufactured was no easy task. The journey traces back to 1864, when Ransom E. Olds was born in Geneva, Ohio. The Olds family moved to the city of Lansing, Michigan when he was a teenager, which was right around the time that Olds started working in the machine shop owned by his father. There, the two of them focused on constructing steam engines.After becoming interested in vehicles, Olds developed a steam-powered
car, which would have been the first car exported from the U.S. to a foreign buyer had the ship carrying it sank not sank on its way to India. Nevertheless, Olds continued on, and by 1896, he had received a patent for a gasoline-powered car and formed the Olds Motor Vehicle Co. the following year. In 1899, Olds moved his second company, Olds Motor Works, to Detroit, where the Oldsmobile name was first used on the company's vehicles.
However, disaster struck again when the company's Detroit factories were consumed by a fire in 1901, so Olds returned to Lansing. In the fires, the company also lost blueprints for all of the Olds vehicles, but one was saved: the curved-dash model. There were several important moments in the history of the Oldsmobile. One was the city of Lansing gifting about 50 acres of land to Olds, so that he was able to continue production of the curved-dash vehicle. But this was just the beginning.
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When Did Oldsmobile Become A GM Brand?
Olds realized he needed to reduce the time it took to produce vehicles. Instead of having a group of workers produce each individual car in a single spot, known as the craft method, Olds gave each worker a specific task at a specific location and moved the car from worker to worker, reducing the time it took to build each vehicle and cutting costs. This was the beginning of the modern production line assembly process. Using this technique, Olds manufactured the curved-dash Oldsmobile, and it became the first mass-produced vehicle in the U.S. as well as the most popular car in terms of sales.
Oldsmobile became a General Motors brand in 1908, when it was purchased by GM head William Durant. Oldsmobile and Buick were the first two divisions that formed the original GM brand. At first, Oldsmobile contributed high-quality vehicles to the GM brand on a lower production scale. In the early 1920s, Olds started to come out with a line of lower-priced cars -- but then the Great Depression hit. While GM considered consolidating its three divisions (Oldsmobile, Buick, and Pontiac), the economy eventually improved and all three survived.
The brand continued on as an important GM division, creating several popular classic Oldsmobile models throughout the years. Ultimately though, Oldsmobile was shut down for good in 2004 as the longest-running U.S. vehicle brand at the time.
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