Freightliner Trucks
American truck brand
Freightliner Trucks is an American semi truck manufacturer. Founded in 1929 as the truck-manufacturing division of Consolidated Freightways (from which it derives its name), the company was established in 1942 as Freightliner Corporation. Owned by Daimler Truck from 1981 to 2021, Freightliner is now a part of Daimler Truck subsidiary Daimler Truck North America (along with Western Star, Detroit Diesel, and Thomas Built Buses).
Freightliner produces a range of vans, medium-duty trucks, and heavy-duty trucks; under its Freightliner Custom Chassis subsidiary, the company produces bare chassis and cutaway chassis for multiple types of vehicles. The company popularized the use of cabover (COE) semitractors, with the Freightliner Argosy later becoming the final example of the type sold in North America.
The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon (the city of its founding); vehicles are currently manufactured in Cleveland, North Carolina, and Mount Holly, North Carolina, and Santiago Tianguistenco and Saltillo, Mexico.
History
Founding (1930s)
Freightliner traces its roots to 1929; following the founding of Consolidated Freightways (CF) in Portland, Oregon, company founder Leland James set up a company division to produce semitractors for company use. Developed in a CF maintenance facility, Freightways Manufacturing used Fageol vehicles as a starting point for the design, placing the cab above the front axle. Shorter in length, the new Freightways truck allowed for CF to use a longer trailer and remain in compliance of the stringent length laws of the time.
In line with the company name, during the 1930s, Freightways Manufacturing began to brand its truck production under the "Freightliner" name.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1420724. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1942, 1981 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Freightliner Trucks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.