Ford Motor Co. has a long history associated with Chicago. In fact, that connection goes back several decades before its current assembly plant was constructed.
JOLIET, IL—Lion Electric Co. recently celebrated the official opening of a 900,000-square-foot facility here that will assemble battery-powered school buses and trucks.
For decades, General Motors was king of the highway and queen of the rails. In addition to mass-producing buses, cars and trucks, the automaker was once the largest locomotive builder in the world. At a massive factory just west of Chicago, GM’s Electro-Motive Division (EMD) assembled powerful machines that helped transition American railroads from steam to diesel.
Once upon a time, many of the fuel gauges, speedometers and other mechanical instruments used in automobiles and other vehicles were made ion the North Side of Chicago by Stewart-Warner Corp.