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1953 – 1970
The Kaiser purchase: AM General's line begins with the Jeep. Kaiser Industries bought the assets of Willys Motors — the Toledo maker of the wartime Jeep — on 23 March 1953, and the firm that resulted, carried first as Kaiser-Willys, became the Kaiser Jeep Corporation in 1963. Alongside the civilian Jeep trade, Kaiser's company built a second business in vehicles for the government: military trucks designed by others and built under contract, and the postal and fleet Dispatchers derived from the Jeep line. That government-products business, not the civilian Jeep, is AM General's direct ancestor.
The Studebaker defense division: On 24 February 1964 Kaiser-Jeep bought the Defense Products Division of the Studebaker Corporation, whose car production in South Bend had ended the previous December. The purchase carried the great Chippewa Avenue works in South Bend — a 1,400,000-square-foot plant built during the Second World War for aircraft engines — and with it Studebaker's standing Army truck contracts, after novation production of the five-ton 6x6 trucks beginning under the new owner. The Chippewa works are South Bend ground and their full telling belongs to the South Bend record; they enter this section because the division that ran them is the division that became AM General, and because a second building Kaiser-Jeep took in those years stands in Mishawaka.
The division organized: Kaiser-Jeep gathered the work into a Defense and Government Products Division — the Danish Army vehicle history of the company dates the division's formation to 1967 — headquartered with the truck plants. By 1969 Edgar Kaiser was ready to sell the automotive operations, and American Motors, strengthened by the sale of its Kelvinator division, was ready to buy. What AMC wanted, on the record of the announcement, was the dealer network and the profitable defense operations in Toledo and South Bend. The Mishawaka building came with them.
Sources:
- Military Trader (Doyle), "The Birth of AM General" — Kaiser-Jeep's 24 February 1964 purchase of Studebaker's Defense Products Division, the Chippewa plant's size and war-built origin, the 1969–70 sale to American Motors.
- Danish Army Vehicles, history of AM General — Defense and Government Products Division formed 1967.
- Company reference histories (encyclopedia/company-history accounts of Kaiser Jeep Corporation) — Kaiser-Willys 1953, Kaiser Jeep Corporation 1963.