The current troubled times that General Motors is going through can easily obscure the simple fact that General Motors has been a wildly successful company for almost a hundred years.

The company was started by William Durant in 1908 as a holding company for the Buick manufacturing company. Within a year it had acquired Oldsmobile, Cadillac and several other smaller companies.

Very soon after this rapid expansion, car sales in the U.S. softened considerably and the company ran into problems in some ways very similar to those of the last few years.

In retrospect this was a good thing and forced Durant to go back to the drawing board. The result was the birth of Chevrolet – a brand modeled to some degree on the ideas of Henry Ford.

Roger’s Auto Group has the most affordable cars in the Chicago land area with the best collection of Chicago Chevrolet and other Chicago GMC cars and trucks. When you buy a GMC vehicle you are buying today’s innovation for tomorrow’s future.

The success of Chevrolet gave Durant the power and influence to gradually buy back into General Motors, and within a few short years he had acquired a controlling interest in General Motors again.

Durant was instrumental in reorganizing General Motors as well as forming a new company in Canada – General Motors of Canada. From that day till the present General Motors has remained an integrated North American company with approximately 20% of its manufacturing capacity located in southern Ontario, Canada.

In those early days “Chevy” was an innovative brand which had carved out a distinctive niche – to attempt to provide a better alternative to the “everyman” customer who had come to identify with Henry Ford’s early vehicles.

As early as 1918 Chevrolet introduced a production V-8 engine, an overhead valve inline six cylinder engine, more advanced carburetors, the three speed transmission, and a five seater touring vehicle. As a result, GM’s share of world wide vehicles steadily increased until by 1931 it was the world’s number one maker of vehicles.