1878 – 1941

He learned his first mechanical skills in a bicycle workshop got hooked on racing bikes, moved on to auto racing, and his name lives on in one of America's best loved cars.

Louis Chevrolet was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the French speaking part of Switzerland, a center of the watch industry, but moved to France with his family at the age of nine. He soon left school and started work as a mechanic, first on bikes and then on cars.

He emigrated to Canada in 1900, where he stayed for six months working as a chauffeur, and arrived in the US in 1901, where he soon embarked on the path that was to make him famous. His muscular build suited him to auto racing at a time when cars were heavy to steer.

He won his first race in 1905 in a Fiat. In 1907 he started work with Buick, where he was both designer and race director. He drove a Buick in the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, but was forced to drop out early because of a broken camshaft.

He teamed up with financier W C Durant, founder of General Motors (GM), to set up the Chevrolet Motor Company of Michigan which produced his Classic-Six limousine. But Durant wanted to build cheap cars to reach a mass market, while Chevrolet wanted to design cars for the rich. When the two men split, the Chevrolet name went to GM. Durant attached it to many further models which he went on to produce.

Chevrolet went on to design more cars; his Frontenac won the Indy 500 in 1920 when it was driven by his younger brother Gaston.

But Chevrolet's success as a designer was greater than his success as a businessman, and he never made the fortune his skills might have destined him for. In 1929 he left the auto making business altogether in favor of aircraft design. But that too failed to prosper.

In the early 1930s he was taken on by GM in its Chevrolet plant, but ill health forced him to retire in 1938. He died in 1941 as the result of complications arising from the amputation of a leg.

Louis Chevrolet is buried in Indianapolis, where the Chevrolet memorial was dedicated in 1975. In 1991 a square was named after him in Bonfol, the village in Switzerland from where his family originated.