Gillig
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| Private | |
| Industry | Transit |
| Founded | San Francisco, California, 1890 |
| Founder | Jacob Gillig |
| Headquarters |
25800 Clawiter Road Hayward, California 94545, United States |
|
Area served
|
North America |
|
Key people
|
David H. Dornsife (Chairman) |
| Products | Heavy-duty low floor transit buses |
| Parent | Henry Crown & Company |
| Website | www.gillig.com |
Gillig Corporation (formerly Gillig Brothers) is an American designer and manufacturer of buses. The company headquarters, along its manufacturing operations, is located in Hayward, California (the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay). Gillig is the second largest transit bus manufacturer by volume in North America, behind New Flyer. As of 2013, Gillig had an approximate 31% market share of the combined US and Canadian heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing industry, based on the number of equivalent unit deliveries.
While currently a manufacturer of transit buses, from the 1930s to the 1990s, Gillig was a manufacturer of school buses. Alongside the now-defunct Crown Coach, the company was one of the largest manufacturers of school buses on the West Coast of the United States.
The oldest surviving bus manufacturer in North America, Gillig was founded in 1890 as Jacob Gillig, trained in carriage building and upholstering, opened his own carriage shop in San Francisco. In 1896, his son Leo Gillig entered the business as a shop foreman, becoming a full partner in the business in 1900. The shop was destroyed as part of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but the Gilligs rebuilt the shop on a separate property; Chester Gillig joined the business as a bookkeeper. In 1907, Jacob Gillig died at the age of 54.
Following the earthquake, the company reopened as the Leo Gillig Automobile Works, which manufactured custom-built vehicle bodies. In 1914, two major achievements would happen to the company. After building a three-story factory, Leo and Chester Gillig re-organized the company as Gillig Brothers, its name for the next half-century. One of the first bodies built inside the new factory was one for a motor bus, though production would not shift entirely to buses for another two decades.
During the 1910s, most cars in the United States were open touring cars; at the time, fully enclosed sedan bodies were expensive. To offer improvement over the minimal weather protection, Gillig developed an add-on hardtop, patenting its own version in 1919.
The increase of closed car production in the 1920s would render the "Gillig Top" largely obsolete by 1925. While other hardtop manufacturers went out of business, Gillig survived largely on its body production, which became its primary source of revenue. In the late 1920s, the company would briefly produce pleasure boats and produce a prototype of a heavy truck; the latter would never enter production.
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Wikipedia