An antifreeze name the company dates to 1927.

Prestone is an American antifreeze and coolant brand, and its own account of its past starts in 1927. The company’s anniversary history page, written for the brand’s 90th year, dates the launch of Prestone ethylene glycol antifreeze to that year and presents it as the product that let drivers keep using their cars through the winter. The page is the company’s own account, and the dates on it are given here as the company’s.

For much of the twentieth century the name belonged to the chemicals group Union Carbide. English Wikipedia’s article on Union Carbide lists Prestone antifreeze among the consumer businesses the group later divested, alongside Eveready and Energizer batteries, Glad bags and wraps and Simoniz car wax. The same article says the battery business was sold to Ralston Purina in 1986, the year the rest of the car-care side also left the group.

Prestone’s history page sets out a sequence of product dates under that long ownership. It says that in 1930 the brand added an inhibitor to its cooling-system product, and that during the Second World War its antifreeze/coolant was used by the United States military; it dates that entry to 1944. It says that in 1962 the large Detroit car makers began filling new cars with ethylene glycol antifreeze at the factory, turning the fluid into a year-round product, and that in 1964 the brand rolled out a wider range of car-care products. In 1967, the company says, cars in the Daytona 500 ran with Prestone Brake Fluid.

The same page dates a reformulated Super Flush to 1977, Prestone LowTox antifreeze/coolant to 1994, a De-Icer windshield washer fluid to 1995 and Bug Wash washer fluid to 1996. An interior cleaner followed in 1998 and a line of fuel additives in 1999, according to the company. The page is written as a timeline that sets each product beside a headline event of its year, from a transatlantic flight in 1927 to the founding of YouTube in 2005, the year the company says it received a United States patent for a reformulated Bug Wash.

First Brands, Honeywell, Rank, KIK and Recochem.

The car-care side of Union Carbide left the group in the mid-1980s. English Wikipedia’s article on STP says that in 1986 Union Carbide’s automotive products, including Prestone and Simoniz, were the subject of a leveraged buyout, and that the resulting company was named First Brands.

By the 2000s Prestone sat inside the industrial group Honeywell. In a press release dated 29 July 2011, Honeywell announced that it had completed the sale of its Consumer Products Group to Rank Group Limited, which it described as a New Zealand-based private company investing across a variety of industries. Honeywell listed four automotive brands in that group: FRAM filters, Prestone antifreeze, Autolite spark plugs and Holts car care products. English Wikipedia’s Autolite article says that until 2011 Autolite had been part of that Honeywell group along with FRAM and Prestone, and that AlliedSignal, an earlier owner of Autolite, was itself acquired by Honeywell in 1999.

The next owner was KIK Custom Products, the consumer-products maker that started as a private-label bleach plant in Concord, Ontario. KIK’s corporate timeline says the company entered the automotive category through the acquisition of Prestone and Holts, which it describes as specialising in antifreeze/coolant, performance chemicals and appearance products. Prestone’s own timeline from those years dates the Prestone Command heavy-duty line to 2013, Cor-Guard antifreeze to 2014 and its Triple Seal cooling-system products to 2015, and marks the brand’s 90th anniversary in 2017.

The current owner arrived in 2024. In a joint announcement dated 18 June 2024, issued from Montreal and from Lawrenceville, Georgia, Recochem and KIK Consumer Products said Recochem had acquired KIK’s Auto Care business, which comprised Prestone in North America and Holts in the United Kingdom. Canadian Lawyer recorded the deal under that date, and S&P Global’s AftermarketInsight reported it on 24 June 2024. The release says Recochem was founded in 1951 and is headquartered in Montreal, and that the private equity firm CapVest Partners acquired Recochem in November 2023. KIK’s chief executive, Michael Sload, said in the release that the company saw “strong prospects for the business under Recochem’s ownership.” Recochem has owned Prestone since 2024.

Car care and its owners.

The brands in this group sell antifreeze, engine additives, waxes and polishes, and they meet buyers on the same shelf of a car-parts store or a supermarket aisle. Products of this kind are usually chosen in a few seconds, standing in front of rows of jugs, bottles, tins and tubs, so the pack does much of the work that a showroom or a salesperson would do for other goods.

A car-care brand’s identity is carried less by a single product than by its containers: the shape and colour of a plastic jug, the label wrapped around a small additive bottle, the lid of a round wax tin or the cap of a polish bottle. Names on those packs may also outlast the companies that created them, passing from founders to larger groups and from one market to another.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A yellow jug, a redesigned bottle and a family of sub-brands.

Prestone’s packaging is the part of the brand shoppers handle. The company’s history page refers to its antifreeze/coolant as coming in a yellow jug, and dates a redesigned one-gallon bottle, which it calls the “No Glug Jug,” to 2001. The same page dates a fully synthetic power steering fluid rollout across European, Asian and American markets to 2012.

The current website groups the range into Antifreeze+Coolant, Performance Chemicals, Ice Protection, Washer Fluid and System Maintenance & Repair, with separate sections for Prestone EVX and the heavy-duty Prestone Command line. The site runs in English and Spanish editions for the United States and English and French editions for Canada. Its footer names Prestone Products Corporation as the owner of the Prestone, Prestone Command and Prestone Low Tox trademarks, registered in the United States and other countries, and says other marks on the site, including Dex-Cool from General Motors, are used under license.

The brand also has a sister in Britain. Holts, the car-care name that travelled with Prestone through Honeywell, Rank and KIK, now sits beside it inside Recochem, and the 2024 release presents Recochem in Canada, Prestone in the United States and Holts in the United Kingdom as one group.

For a design guide, Prestone shows how a single colour on a single container can carry a brand through a succession of corporate owners, from a chemicals group to private investors. Compare STP and Simoniz, two car-care names that shared Union Carbide and First Brands with it. For this guide we use jug yellow, winter navy and frost with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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