Latil

Automobiles Industriels Latil, commonly known as 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, to market Georges Latil's , an early front-wheel drive system. The company was established in 1909 by entrepreneur Charles Blum as Charles Blum & Cie. It started to use in the 1910s as a trading name. The company started to produce military vehicles by the 1910s and commercial ones in great numbers by the end of World War I. In 1928, the company adopted its trading name as its legal name. It was dissolved in 1955 after being merged into the Saviem group.

==History== ===Early years and predecessors=== 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 , later trading as . 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.