At General Motors, platform sharing and badge engineering go right back to the founding of the company. Witness the 1909 Oldsmobile Model 20.
When William C. Durant founded General Motors on September 16, 1908, his Buick Motor Car Company formed the core of the enterprise. After attempts to join Maxwell-Briscoe and Ford to his combine failed due to lack of financing, he turned to the Olds Motor Works of Lansing, Michigan. Struggling at the time, Olds was receptive to a deal, and a merger between GM and Olds was formally announced on November 12, 1908. In truth the deal was a stock swap in which only $17,000 in cash was involved.
Buick Model 10 Surrey
Among the problems at Olds was the lack of a product to follow up on the best-selling Curved Dash Oldsmobile. Founder Ransom E. Oldsmobile had left the company in 1904 to launch the Reo Motor Car Company, and while the Curved Dash model had sold nearly 4,000 copies in 1903, in 1908 Olds volume had fallen to 1,055 cars with a lineup that consisted of the not terribly popular models M, MR, X, and Z. That’s when the new parent company GM devised a plan to revive Olds’ fortunes, and by all accounts the idea came from Durant himself.
The Buick Model 10 had been a remarkable success, generating the demand that inspired Durant to expand his operations in the auto industry. (More on the Model 10 here). So why not have Olds produce its own version of the Buick Model 10? As Durant himself told the story in an unpublished manuscript, he had a Model 10 body placed on sawhorses and cut into quarters with a crosscut saw, and then spread apart on the Lansing factory floor to provide a model for the new Oldsmobile. In some accounts in GM lore an entire car was sawn apart, chassis and all, but that seems unlikely.
Oldsmobile Model 20 Touring
What we can say for certain is that the production 1909 Oldsmobile Model 20 was essentially a Buick Model 10 with the wheelbase extended from 88 to 100 inches and a larger and more elaborate body. An Olds-style hood and radiator were also fitted. Track width was unchanged at the standard 56 inches. The running gear—transmission, rear axle and final drive, wheels, and suspension—were all shared with the Buick Model 10.
The Olds Model 20 engine was indeed the Buick Model 10 inline four with no reported changes. Displacing 165 cubic inches with its cylinders cast in pairs, it featured a totally exposed valve-in-head valvetrain and iron cylinders cast in pairs on an aluminum crankcase. Like the Buick Model 10, the Oldsmobile 20 was rated at 22.5 hp at around 1,200 rpm.
The Oldsmobile Model 20 was offered in a single body style, a touring car, and priced at $1,200, around $100 more than the Buick in similar trim. According to official Oldsmobile factory records, 5,325 Model 20s were produced—the great bulk of the company’s total volume of 6,575 cars that year. However, the authors of the official Olds history, Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile’s First 100 Years, cast doubt on the Model 20 figures, asserting that they were probably far lower. In any event, the Lansing automaker was now on the mend, and it would remain a GM division for another 95 years. And the practice of platform sharing at GM and all the major automakers remains commonplace to this day.
