The car named Oakland — for the county it was built in

Everybody around here remembers the Pontiac — the GTO, the Firebird, the wide-track Bonnevilles. Almost nobody remembers the car that came first and gave General Motors its foothold in this county: the Oakland, a brand named flat-out for Oakland County, the place where it was built.

The story starts with Edward Murphy, who ran the Pontiac Buggy Company, a successful horse-carriage maker in the city of Pontiac. By 1907 it was clear the horse era was ending, so Murphy organized the Oakland Motor Car Company and started building automobiles inside a corner of his buggy factory. He named the cars for the county. The first ones rolled out in 1908.

The Oakland caught the eye of William Durant, the whirlwind founder of General Motors, who was buying up promising young carmakers as fast as he could. GM took a half-interest in Oakland in 1909, and when Murphy died suddenly that same year, the company swallowed the rest. For two decades Oakland was a solid, mid-priced GM division, churning out tens of thousands of cars a year from Pontiac.

Then GM did something that would feel familiar to anyone who’s watched a parent company rebrand a product. In 1926 the division launched a cheaper companion car and called it the Pontiac — for the same city, the same Odawa chief. The Pontiac outsold its own parent almost immediately. By 1931 GM dropped the Oakland name entirely and renamed the whole operation the Pontiac Motor Company. The county’s namesake car was gone, eclipsed by the city’s.

So Oakland County once had a car of its own, badged with its name, built by its people — and then watched it vanish into a brand that itself lasted until 2010. Both are gone now. But the next time you pass an old GM plant site in Pontiac, remember it started as a buggy shop that named its first automobile after the county all around it.