The Automotive Hall of Fame is proud to announce a new project aimed at telling the stories of our Inductees and Honorees. We have begun releasing a series of videos titled “Vintage AHF.” These videos profile our early inductees who laid the foundation for the automotive industry as we know it today. Our second installment of this series features the “three musketeers”, Owen Skelton, Fred Zeder, and Carl Breer, the three engineers who helped establish the Chrysler Corporation and is narrated by the Carl Breer II, the grandson of Inductee Carl Breer.

In 1918, future Automotive Hall of Fame Inductee Fred Zeder was working at Studebaker. He was looking for engineering help there, and asked fellow future Automotive Hall of Fame Inductees Carl Breer and Owen Skelton to come work with him. The trio were all uniquely talented and together made for a dynamic engineering team.

This video outlines the trio’s beginnings at Studebaker, their transition to the Willys-Overland Automobile Company at the behest of Walter Chrysler, where they engineered the car that would eventually become the Chrysler Six. The Chrysler Six would be sold under the Maxwell brand after Willys-Overland could not afford to produce the car. It was the success of that vehicle that led the reorganization of Maxwell as the Chrysler Corporation in 1925.

Chrysler Engineer Tobe Couture once said of the trio’s contributions “if it had not been for Zeder, Skelton, and Breer and their continuous efforts and hardships, there wouldn’t be a Chrysler Corporation.”

Click below watch our second episode of this series. To see more Inductee tribute videos, please visit our Inductee and Honoree database. If you would like to support this project or the production of an Inductee tribute video, please contact media coordinator Matt Wolfe at mwolfe@thedrivingspirit.org.