(AOL Autos) -- With car companies going in into bankruptcy and shedding famous names left and right, it's important to remember that today's automotive titans started out as tiny startups, not unlike Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.





General Motors was almost called International Motors Co.





Names like Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota and Porsche call to mind the huge corporate successes of the past and the great automotive families that survive today.





But behind every brand name, there is a flesh-and-blood inventor, entrepreneur or industrialist. Most of the time, they gave their name to the companies. And that fame was often about all they ended up with.





David Buick, who invented the overhead valve engine, founded the Buick Motor Car Co. in 1903. William C. Durant, the industrialist who would eventually found GM, took over the company in 1904, when it ran into financial trouble.





Buick stayed on as a director, but left in 1908, never making much money from the enterprise. He reportedly died in 1929, unable to afford one of his cars.





Durant kept the name for one of his company divisions and for the car, even though he worried that people might pronounce it "Boo-ick," according to one author. Strangely enough, the man who practically created General Motors single-handedly never really liked the idea of a 'Durant' car.





In another example, Robert Hupp invented the Hupmobile,'a two-seat runabout, in 1908. But he sold his stock in his Hupp Motor Car Company in 1911. He turned around and founded the Hupp Corp. that same year. Investors in his first firm took him to court to make him drop the "Hupp" from his new company's name and they won. His own automotive glory quickly faded, although the Hupmobile survived until the 1940s.





Swiss-born Louis Chevrolet's experience was similar. Durant brought him into a new car-building venture in 1911, hoping to trade on his fame as an absolutely fearless race car driver. Chevrolet left the company in 1913, apparently unable to make the adjustment from racing to building production vehicles. But its name stuck to the new Chevrolet vehicles; Durant reportedly liked its musical lilt.





It could also work the other way around. In 1925, Walter P. Chrysler got the naming rights to the Maxwell Motor Co. after he and another industrialist steadily bought up shares in the firm over a two-year period.





Things turned out a little differently for Henry Ford. He suffered the ignominy of being booted from an early auto company that bore his own name. But his revenge was sweet.





The Henry Ford Company, which traded freely on Ford's early fame as an inventor, fired him in 1902 "because he was spending all his time developing a race car, not a passenger car," according to the Encyclopedia of American Business and Biography. AOL Autos: Ford's 'Wonder Woman' engineers most important new car





After Ford was gone, the company was renamed Cadillac, after Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, the French nobleman who founded Detroit in 1703; his heraldry became the model's badge and the company became a part of General Motors in 1909.





After his firing, Ford quickly found investors to help him found his own firm, the Ford Motor Co., in 1903. He introduced the company's first new vehicle, the Model and followed it up with other low-cost vehicles, including his greatest achievement, the Model T, in 1908. Its price tag started at $850 and fell steadily as Ford introduced more production innovations. The young firm became phenomenally successful. AOL Autos: 10 classic American rides





In the 1920s, he got the chance to buy the five-year-old Lincoln Motor Co. out of bankruptcy. It was then owned by one of the very people, Henry Leland, who fired him in 1902. Then he used the former aircraft company to launch his own line of luxury cars bearing the Lincoln name.





For its part, General Motors almost didn't get the name it bears today. Durant actually incorporated his company
who invented the overhead valve engine? Who was Chevy named after?
David Buick, Louis Chevrolet's
question: who invented the overhead valve engine?, answer: David Buick, | question: Who was Chevy named after?, answer: Louis Chevrolet's