Originally a woodworking and cart manufacturing business founded in the Middle Ages, the company evolved along the centuries and entered the automotive industry with the creation of the Tidaholm car in 1903.

Founded in the Middle Ages, over the years it merged with several smaller industries into woodworking, ironworking, and the making of carts.

[1] In the small community of Sandhem outside Tidaholm, brothers Gottfrid and David Lindström founded a workshop in 1895, where they made Kronan bicycles.

After a while Gottfrid got tired of making bicycles and went to USA to study the budding automobile industry and returned full of new ideas, which he presented to the Managing Director of Tidaholms Bruk.

In the fall of 1903 it was time for the first start attempt which was successful and the first Tidaholm car (which was a truck, actually) could roll out of the workshop under its own power.

The high reliability of the car inspired the managing director Victor Johansson to put Lindström in charge of building Tor II which was finished in 1905.

By 1907–1910 the manufacturing had come so far that the works built a small series of ten chassis of type TB, a combined truck and personnel car, or open bus powered by a four-cylinder, German Fafnir engine, giving about 12 hp.

Due to rubber shortages, the trucks were also delivered with wheels that could accommodate ersatz tires made from wood.

In 1929 they introduced hydraulic four wheel brakes, which was also when the company begun developing its first engine operating on the Hesselman principle.

Tidaholms Bruk made well built engines and chassis and they sold well, but experiments and frequent new designs leading to small production runs cost a lot of money.

The Great Depression led to the Kreuger crash, after which the company was taken over by Stockholms Enskilda Bank - controlled by the Wallenberg family.