Latil

Automobiles Industriels Latil was a French manufacturer of commercial and military vehicles created to manage the assets of the defunct Compagnie Française d'Mecánique et d'Automobiles. The company started to produce military vehicles by the 1910s and commercial ones by the end of World War I. It was dissolved in 1955 after being merged into the Saviem group. In 1898, Georges Latil and Aloïs Korn established an enterprise in Marseille (Korn et Latil) to market a Latil invention, the , a kit to convert carriages into front-wheel drive vehicles. In 1901, Latil and Korn moved its operations to Levallois-Perret and created the to sell it in Paris. Despite an initial success, the company was declared bankrupt. By 1905, Charles Blum became an investor and administrator of the company's assets. In 1909, he took over the assets and created a new company called to manage them. He kept Georges Latil and his brother Lazare as part of the technical managing team. In June 1912, the company was reorganised as a and renamed . That same year, Blum established another company to operate a fleet of vehicles equipped with the . In 1914, Latil opened a new, larger production plant in Suresnes to replace Levallois-Perret. The Suresnes plant had 20,000 square metres (m2) of covered area in a site of 30,000 m2. By 1911, the company started to develop field artillery haulage, for which they created tractors with the layout of a truck. Latil produced its first four-wheel, all-terrain vehicle called the motorised artillery tractor (TAR), which it sold to the army to use on the Voie Sacrée during World War I to supply troops with 155mm guns. After the war, the company also entered into the commercial vehicle business, including trucks. In 1924, it unveiled the first of the TL series of four-wheel drive multipurpose tractors. In November 1928, all the Latil group companies were merged into which became a and was renamed as . In the 1930s, Latil introduced diesel engines using Gardner licence for direct injection. The company also opened a second plant at Saint-Cloud.