The man behind the name......
Louis Joseph Chevrolet was born on December 25, 1878 at La Chaux de Fonds in Switzerland. Joseph, his father, was a clock builder and watchmaker. When Louis was ten, the family moved to the town of Beaune, in France’s wine country. Louis did not receive much formal education. Showing mechanical aptitude from an early age, he found work in a local bicycle repair shop. He became an outstanding bicyclist and, when he began to enter races, won 28 events in three seasons. Eventually he built Frontenac bicycles, named in honor of the governor of the French colonies in North America under Louis XIV. After Louis left Beaune, in about 1896, he took various jobs in the French auto industry, seeking to add to his knowledge of the internal combustion engine. Crossing the Atlantic in 1900, he worked as a chauffeur in Montreal for six months before heading for New York, where he found work as a mechanic. He began racing Fiats in 1904 and won his first big race in May, 1905. He also met and married his wife, Suzanne, that same year. Louis went to work for Buick as a driver in 1907; it was here that he met William C. Durant. By 1911, Durant had hired him as a consultant, and they began work on the Chevrolet car. The Classic Six was engineered by Etienne Planche, who followed Chevrolet’s instructions and designed a 299-cid six-cylinder engine. The Classic Six has not received much attention over the years, but it was a sound car and compared favorably with the competition at that time.
Louis resigned from the Chevrolet Motor Company in October, 1913. A major point of friction leading to the split with Durant was Durant's realization that high volume and big dollars come only come through the manufacture and selling of a low-priced automobile. Louis, violently opposed to his car being reduced to this, left the Chevrolet organization and sold his stock. Durant, not Louis Chevrolet, owned the Chevrolet trademark. When Louis Chevrolet organized his own business in 1914, he had no right to call it by his family name. Instead, he chose another name that had brought him good luck in the past. He called it Frontenac Motor Corporation.
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