The Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company (informally Yellow Coach) was an early manufacturer of passenger buses in the United States. Between 1923 and 1943, Yellow Coach built transit buses, electric-powered trolley buses, and parlor coaches. Founded in Chicago in 1923 by John D. Hertz as a subsidiary of his Yellow Cab Company, the company was renamed "Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company" in 1925 when General Motors (GM) purchased a majority stake. After GM completely acquired the company in 1943, it was merged with GM's truck division to form the GM Truck & Coach Division. The car rental subsidiary (known both as Hertz Drivurself Corp and Yellow Drive-It-Yourself) was purchased back by John Hertz in 1953 through The Omnibus Corporation and floated the following year as The Hertz Corporation. History John D. Hertz and associates began acquiring smaller Chicago-area companies involved in bus-building in 1922, and soon assembled a manufacturing site covering four square blocks. Yellow Coach Manufacturing Co was formally established in 1923 as a subsidiary of Hertz's Yellow Cab Company, and sold 207 buses in its first year. George J. Rackham, whose career had commenced with the London General Omnibus Company after the First World War, spent the years 1922–1926 in the U.S., and recognised the advantage of low swept chassis frame for bus development while employed by Yellow. It is likely that he was recruited by Hertz to help start up the bus building business. In 1926, he returned to England to join Leyland Motors as Chief Engineer and was responsible for the groundbreaking Titan and Tiger models. General Motors purchased a controlling stake in the company in 1925 and changed the name to the Yellow Truck & Coach Manufacturing Company, and relocated production to Pontiac West Assembly in Pontiac, Michigan. Within the transit industry, the company continued to be called simply Yellow Coach. In the 1930s, Yellow Coach produced best-selling models for the rapidly expanding urban transit and intercity bus businesses. (In 1935, national intercity bus ridership climbed 50% to 651,999,000 passengers, surpassing the volume of passengers carried by the Class I railroads for the first time. ) Yellow Coach played a significant role in the transition from electric streetcars (operating on rails, powered by overhead wires) to transit companys' use of gasoline- or diesel-powered buses operating on rubber wheels (changing from solid wheels to pneumatic tires). For Greyhound Lines, the largest operator of intercity bus service,