Flxible - Charles Kettering and General Motors

Charles Kettering and General Motors

Charles Kettering, a Loudonville, Ohio native and vice president of General Motors, was closely associated with Flxible for almost the entire first half of the company's existence. In 1914, Flxible was incorporated with the help of Kettering, who then became president of the company and joined the board of directors. Kettering provided significant funding for the company in its early years, particularly after 1916, when Kettering sold his firm, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco), to GM for $2.5 million. Kettering continued to serve as president of Flxible, until he became chairman of the board in 1940, a position he held until his death in 1958. After selling Delco to GM in 1916, Kettering organized and ran a research laboratory at GM, and by the 1950s, held the position of vice president at GM. As a result of Kettering's close relationship with both GM and Flxible, many GM parts were used in the production of Flxible vehicles, particularly prior to GM's 1943 purchase of Yellow Coach (a competing bus manufacturer, of which GM had been a majority owner since 1925). For example, most Flxible ambulances, hearses, and buses from the mid-1920s to the early-1940s were built on Buick chassis, and Flxible's "Airway" model buses of the mid-1930s were built on a Chevrolet chassis.

In 1958, and as a result of the consent decree from the 1956 anti-trust case, United States v. General Motors Corp., GM was mandated to sell their bus components, engines, and transmissions to other manufacturers, free of royalties. However, in the early 1950s and prior to the consent decree, Flxible built a small number of buses with GM diesel engines while Kettering still served on the board. It has been postulated that GM may have made its diesel engines available to Flxible to reduce the criticisms of GM's business practices that some felt were monopolistic. The same has been said about GM's decision in the 1960s and 1970s not to produce a 35 ft (11 m) "New Look" transit bus with an 8-cylinder engine. However, it is also possible that GM chose not to enter this market because the potential sales did not warrant the added costs of engineering and production. Another result of the consent decree (which was not settled in its entirety until 1965) was that GM was barred from having any of its officers or directors serve as an officer or director for any other bus manufacturing company. This provision would have applied to Kettering, had he not died in 1958.