Who Owns Holley, And Where Are Its Carburetors Made?

Holley Performance Products is a brand known to anyone who has wandered the aisles of their local auto parts store or spent time poking around the engine compartments of older vehicles.

The Holley 4150 four-barrel carb was factory-issued equipment on the 1957 Ford Thunderbird, and three two-barrel Holley carbs were used to fuel Corvette 427 tri-power and Mopar six-pack 440 engines.  Holley's current product line includes fuel injection systems, starters and alternators, ignition components, gaskets, and just about anything else that goes on or in a car engine. 

Holley also makes complete LS engine swap kits for a wide range of vehicles, along with kits to convert your classic car or truck into an electric vehicle. Holley is still best known for the carburetors it has been making since the peak of the muscle car era of the 1960s and '70s, but where are Holley carburetors made and who owns Holley today?

Holley manufactures its carburetors and about 2,000 other products in Bowling Green, Kentucky's South Central Kentucky Industrial Park. The company's headquarters is located just a few minutes away, near the campus of Western Kentucky University. In March of 2021, Empower Limited purchased Holley from the private equity firm Sentinel Capital Parners. Sentinel had acquired Holley three years prior to that, and Empower Limited was formed with the intent of taking Holley public, which it did on July 16, 2021.

Long before Holley was swapping between corporate owners, it was the vision of brothers George and Earl Holley, who returned from a 1901 trip to France with a license to build and sell the Longuemare carburetor. They installed it on their gas-powered Auto-Bike, which had pedals and a 2 1/4 horsepower motor and could hit a top speed of 35 mph. In 1902, they built a motorcar, the Motorette runabout, also fueled by the Longuemare carb. According to the Holley blog, the Holley brothers made 600 Motorettes that year before Henry Ford urged them to switch to manufacturing carburetors instead.

The Holley brothers moved to Detroit and built carburetors for the Model T until Ford bought George and Earl out in 1917. They soon went back into business and built carburetors for boats and airplanes through World War II. At the time of the company's 2021 acquisition by Empower Limited, Holley was valued at $1.55 billion. Not quite that valuable is the lone remaining Holley Auto-Bike, which is on display at Holley headquarters in Bowling Green along with one of three  (or possibly four) surviving Motorettes.