Freightliner Trucks is an American manufacturer of heavy duty trucks, chassis and semi-trailer trucks in the United States. The company was founded as Freightliner Inc in 1942 and is now a division of Daimler Trucks North America, a subsidiary of the German Daimler AG. The company is known mainly for the heavy duty class 8 diesel trucks it produces, as well as classes 5-7 trucks. As of 2005, Freightliner is the largest manufacturer of heavy duty trucks in North America with annual revenue of over $32 billion and over 22,000 employees . Because Freightliner LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of... Daimler, a non-American corporation, it is not included in Fortune 500 rankings. It is comparable to the 125th largest company in those rankings based on the criteria used. In the 1930s, Consolidated Freightways decided to produce their own truck line from reconstructed Fageols, after finding most heavy trucks had insufficient power to climb the steep grades in the mountain regions of the western United States.
more