Oakland Motor Car Company
defunct American automobile manufacturer and division of the General Motors Corporation
The Oakland Motor Car Company was an American automobile manufacturer and later division of General Motors in operation from 1907 to 1931. Located in Pontiac, Michigan, it was purchased by General Motors in 1909 and continued to produce modestly priced automobiles until 1931 when the brand was dropped in favor of the division's Pontiac brand.
Beginning
The Oakland Motor Company was created by Edward Murphy, who owned the Pontiac Buggy Company, and Alanson Brush, inventor of the single-cylinder Cadillac and Brush Runabout, who was working as a consultant in Detroit after leaving Cadillac. It was named for Oakland County, Michigan, in which it was based. As originally conceived and introduced, the first Oakland used a design created by Brush and presented to Murphy, who liked the idea and decided to go into business. It included a vertical two-cylinder engine that rotated counterclockwise, originally presented to Cadillac and rejected, and a planetary transmission.
The 1908 Oakland came in five body styles, designated Model A–E, varying from a runabout to a landaulet. A total of 278 vehicles were produced that year.
GM Division
After one year of production, Oakland's principal founder, Edward Murphy, sold half of the company to William C. Durant's General Motors Corporation in early 1909. When Murphy died in the summer of 1909, GM acquired the remaining rights to Oakland.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oakland Motor Car Company” as defunct American automobile manufacturer and division of the General Motors Corporation. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as defunct American automobile manufacturer and division of the General Motors Corporation. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1817947. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 1931, 1909 and 1908.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oakland Motor Car Company” 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.