Peterbilt
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|
| Division | |
| Industry | Truck Manufacturing |
| Founded | 1939 |
| Headquarters |
Denton, Texas United States |
| Products | See listing |
| Parent | Paccar |
| Website | www.peterbilt.com |
Peterbilt Motors Company, founded in 1939 in Oakland, California, is an American manufacturer of medium- and heavy-duty Class 5 through to Class 8 trucks. It operates manufacturing facilities and has its headquarters in Denton, Texas. It also has a factory in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec.
From 1939 until the mid-1980s, the company was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. The original plant was in Oakland, which closed and in 1960, to move to Newark, California, also in the East Bay. Its headquarters and a new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant opened in Newark in October 1960. Truck production there ended at the close of 1986. Division headquarters and engineering remained in Newark until 1992, when a new administrative complex and a new engineering department at the Denton plant were completed. The new Madison/Nashville plant opened in 1969 in Madison, Tennessee, for the east-coast market. Originally it only manufactured the 352/282 cabover, then conventional production began in the 1970s, until it was closed in 2009. Production of class 8 trucks continues at the Denton, Texas plant.
In the early part of the 20th century, Tacoma, Washington plywood manufacturer and lumber entrepreneur T.A. Peterman was faced with a lumber logistics problem. He could not get logs from the forest to his lumber mill quickly or efficiently. He sought to improve upon the methods of the day: floating logs down river, or the use of steam tractors and horse teams. Peterman knew that if he could develop the then-nascent automobile technology and build trucks, he could solve his problem.
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Wikipedia