Who makes fire engines? You can’t just run down to the Chevy dealer, pick between red & yellow, choose a tank capacity and then finance it with GMAC. Or can you? Every community needs fire engines, tankers, pumpers, hook & ladder trucks, rescue vehicles, and so on. There are fire fighting museums and web pages devoted to antique fire trucks. But where do new ones come from? American LaFrance Corporation. Digging a little deeper, I found, as I semi-sadly often do, that it is a small part of a much bigger deal: DaimlerChrysler. Strictly speaking, it is a subsidiary of FreightLiner, LLC, which is in turn a “DaimlerChrysler company”. American LaFrance is headquartered in Cleveland, North Carolina and has ten manufacturing facilities. They offer free training courses (with purchase!), including “the science of magnetism“. And they list their most recent deliveries on their website. The company started in 1832, making hand-pumped fire engines, went onto steam fire innovations (“We guarantee 80 pounds of steam in five minutes from cold water.”), survived a monopoly restructuring in the 1890s and became the industry leader. So, no you can’t just waltz down the street to get a fire engine, but it appears that you can finance one with DaimlerChrysler Financial Services. Which leads me to wonder: how much do these things cost?