Chevrolet
Swiss born Louis Chevrolet had a background in automobile factories in France before emigrating to North America, shortly after becoming well known as a race car driver. This led to his driving the Buick race cars for owner William Durants Buick team, while at the same time he had shown himself as a capable designer. At this time Chevrolet had his own workshop where he had built prototype engines to his design, and a small race car called the Cornelian. By late 1911, capitalising on the Chevrolet name, the Chevrolet company was started with one of his brothers and various well known auto makers including William Crapo Durant, to help fund the project. But there was a falling out by 1915 (the same year Louis became a US Citizen) over the direction of the company. Durant wanted a mass produced relatively inexpensive car to compete with the likes of Fords Model T, whereas Louis wanted the marque to be a higher performance car built with less cost constraints. This led to Louis Chevrolet selling his stake in the Chevrolet company to Durant, and left to persue other projects (such as Monroe, Frontenac, speed parts and aircraft engines) often with other finacial backers. The Chevrolet brand became so successful within a very short period that the proceeds generated allowed Durant to purchase and regain the controlling interest in General Motors, after which the Chevrolet brand was merged into General Motors, where the Chevrolet marque was placed directly to compete with Ford.
I would recommend anyone interested in Louis Chevrolet and his brothers to check out the totally absorbing website researched and compiled by William Dunbar on his site chevroletbrothers.com
