Number of words: 273

Modern America and automobile grew up together. But like so many early-twentieth-century Americans, it was born elsewhere. “Automobile” is a French word. The nursery of the industry was France. In 1900, just seven years after the French people gave the United States the Statue of Liberty as a belated centennial birthday present, René Panhard and his partner Emile Levassor gave us the modern motor car. They defined the way it looked before Henry Ford. They arranged the system panhard, the basic fore-to-aft formation of radiator, engine, clutch, gearbox, prop shaft, and rear axle. This was far removed from the German Daimler-Benz horseless carriage, which had a gasoline engine turning a belt drive to the wheels.

Serendipitously, the French flavor went further: half of GM’s brand names, so etched into the minds of Americans, are French. Detroit (it means “narrows” in French) was founded by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a French soldier lighting the British colonists who later governed Louisiana. Cadillac died, disgraced, after a spell in the Bastille prison, little knowing how his name would live on. Louis Chevrolet was a Swiss-French racing car driver who came to the United States to drive a Fiat in an early auto race in New York in 1905. He formed the Chevrolet Motor Company and never went back. Then there’s Pontiac-the French name of the chief of the Ottawa tribe of Native Americans. All these French names became synonymous with American capitalism as the auto industry accelerated the twentieth century into unheard-of prosperity. 

Excerpted from Page 25-26  of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran