1908 McLaughlin

Canadian Automotive Museum Audio Content

Our bilingual audio tour explores less well-known stories from the collection, in the voices of the Museum’s volunteers, historians, vehicle experts and more.
Transcript:
The story of the McLaughlin Model F, Oshawa’s first locally-produced automobile, is an automotive legend. In the early 1900s, Sam McLaughlin, the son of a Canadian carriage magnate, was touring the United States, looking for a car to sell. He tested several different models, and was quite taken with the Buick brand produced by American entrepreneur Billy Durant.
Talks fell through between McLaughlin and Durant, but he returned to Oshawa and in 1905 started work on the McLaughlin Model A, a close copy of a contemporary Buick. According to McLaughlin, the project was humming along nicely, with one car complete and 100 more ready as spare parts, when his chief engineer fell seriously ill and production had to be abandoned. Soon after, Billy Durant visited Oshawa, renegotiated the agreement with McLaughlin, and the Model F was born, a Canadian-made version of the popular Buick model of the same name.
Automotive legends being what they are, there are still some holes in the story. Why did McLaughlin decide to build a vehicle identical to Durant’s? If the project was so far along that they were building cars, why did the engineer’s illness stop everything? Where did McLaughlin’s carriage factory get the parts to build 100 cars? What happened to those cars? How did Durant know that McLaughlin’s pilot project had failed?
To complicate things, we also have no documentary evidence of the fabled Model A- there are no surviving photographs, no plans or documents, and all the advertising the company did was for the Model F. It might be that, ever the promoter, McLaughlin had always planned on making Buicks- but wanted to put on a good show for advertising reasons. The Model A remains a complete mystery, but the Model F started more than a century of automotive tradition in Oshawa.