General Motors
General Motors Company is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. Founded in 1908 by William C. Durant, it was the largest automobile manufacturer in the world for 77 consecutive years, from 1931 until 2008, and remains among the largest. It sells vehicles under the Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac and Buick marques, and owns Cruise, an autonomous driving business, and GM Financial.
| General Motors Company | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: GM; S&P 500 component |
| Industry | Automotive, financial services |
| Founded | 16 September 1908 as General Motors Company; reorganised as General Motors Corporation in 1916 and as General Motors Company in 2009 |
| Founder | William C. Durant |
| Headquarters | Renaissance Center, Detroit, Michigan, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Mary Barra (chair and chief executive), Paul Jacobson (chief financial officer) |
| Products | Automobiles, trucks, commercial vehicles, automotive parts, financial services |
| Revenue | Approximately US$187 billion (2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 162,000 |
| Website | gm.com |
General Motors' historical significance lies in its organisational innovations as much as its products. Under Alfred P. Sloan, president from 1923 and chairman until 1956, it developed the multidivisional corporate structure, in which semi-autonomous divisions are coordinated by a small central staff exercising financial control, an arrangement adopted subsequently by a very large proportion of the world's corporations. It also introduced the annual model change, consumer instalment credit through the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, and a ladder of marques priced so that a customer could progress from Chevrolet to Cadillac as income rose, a strategy Sloan described as a car for every purse and purpose.
The company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2009 following the financial crisis, and was reorganised with approximately US$50 billion of assistance from the United States and Canadian governments, emerging as a new entity within 40 days. It has since withdrawn from Europe, Russia, India, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, concentrating on North America and China.
History
Durant and the assembly of the corporation, 1908 to 1920
William C. Durant had built the Durant-Dort Carriage Company of Flint, Michigan, into the largest manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles in the United States before taking control of the struggling Buick Motor Company in 1904 and making it the country's best-selling car within four years.
He incorporated General Motors in New Jersey on 16 September 1908 as a holding company, and within two years acquired more than twenty companies including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland, which became Pontiac, and a large number of component suppliers. His reasoning, that no one could predict which designs or technologies would prevail and that a company should therefore own several, was sound in principle and executed without financial discipline; the purchases were made largely in stock and without adequate investigation, and by 1910 the company could not meet its obligations. A syndicate of bankers provided a loan on terms that removed Durant from control.
He responded by founding Chevrolet in 1911 with the racing driver Louis Chevrolet, building it rapidly, and using its shares to acquire control of General Motors again in 1916, at which point the business was reincorporated in Delaware as General Motors Corporation and Chevrolet was brought inside it. Pierre S. du Pont and the du Pont company invested substantially in 1917 and 1918, becoming the largest shareholder.
Durant lost control a second time in 1920, when the postwar recession caused a collapse in sales and the company again ran out of money. Du Pont and J. P. Morgan and Company recapitalised it and Durant was removed permanently. He lost his fortune in the 1929 crash and was managing a bowling alley in Flint at the end of his life.
Sloan and the modern corporation, 1923 to 1956
Alfred P. Sloan, who had come to General Motors through the acquisition of Hyatt Roller Bearing, became president in 1923 and chairman in 1937, retiring in 1956. His reorganisation of the company, set out in his memoir My Years with General Motors, became the standard model for large corporations.
The central problem he addressed was that Durant's acquisitions competed with one another and could not be controlled centrally without destroying the initiative of their managers. Sloan's solution was a structure of decentralised operating divisions with centralised financial control: each division produced and sold its own vehicles and was judged on return on investment, while a corporate staff allocated capital, set prices between divisions and coordinated policy. He arranged the marques in an ascending price ladder, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac, with each overlapping slightly with the next so that no gap existed for a competitor.
The annual model change, introduced in the 1920s and formalised thereafter, made styling rather than engineering the principal instrument of competition, and the styling organisation Sloan created under Harley Earl, called the Art and Colour Section and later GM Styling, was the first such department in the industry. Earl's work, which included the first concept car in 1938 and the tailfins that dominated American design in the 1950s, made GM the arbiter of automotive appearance for three decades.
General Motors Acceptance Corporation, founded in 1919, allowed customers to buy on instalment at a time when Henry Ford considered credit immoral, and was a decisive competitive advantage. By 1931 General Motors had passed Ford to become the largest car manufacturer in the world, and it remained so until 2008.
The Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, in which workers occupied the Fisher Body plants for 44 days, forced the company to recognise the United Automobile Workers and was the decisive victory of the American industrial union movement. The 1950 agreement, negotiated by Charles Wilson and Walter Reuther and known as the Treaty of Detroit, established the pattern of pensions, healthcare, cost-of-living adjustments and annual wage improvements that defined American industrial employment for the next half century.
During the Second World War General Motors converted entirely to war production, supplying trucks, aircraft, tanks, engines and munitions worth approximately US$12 billion, the largest contribution of any American company. Its German subsidiary Opel, acquired in 1929, produced vehicles for the German armed forces, a matter examined in later historical inquiries.
Charles Wilson, president from 1941 and Secretary of Defense from 1953, is remembered for a remark to a Senate committee, frequently misquoted, that he had thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.
Peak and decline, 1955 to 1990
General Motors held approximately 50 per cent of the American market in the mid-1950s and was the first company to earn a billion dollars in a year. Its dominance was such that antitrust action to break it up was seriously contemplated within the federal government, and the company was understood to restrain its own market share for that reason.
Its products of the period included the Chevrolet small-block V8 of 1955, produced in some form for more than sixty years; the Corvette, introduced in 1953 and the longest-running American sports car; the Chevrolet Impala, at times the best-selling car in the world; the Pontiac GTO of 1964, generally credited with creating the muscle car; and the Cadillac Eldorado and De Ville, which defined American luxury.
The decline that followed had several causes. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965 attacked the handling of the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair, and the company's response, which included hiring private investigators to follow Nader and attempt to discredit him, was exposed in Senate hearings and produced a public apology from the president of the corporation, considerable damage to its standing and a substantial impetus to federal safety regulation.
The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 exposed a product range built around large vehicles, and the small cars GM produced in response, including the Chevrolet Vega with its aluminium engine and the Chevrolet Chevette, were poorly engineered. Japanese manufacturers took share steadily on quality and economy.
Under Roger Smith, chairman from 1981 to 1990, the company spent very large sums on responses that largely failed. A reorganisation in 1984 merged the car divisions into two groups and destroyed the distinctiveness that Sloan's structure had created, producing a period in which Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and Buicks were visibly the same vehicle with different badges. Approximately US$40 billion was spent on automation and on the acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems from Ross Perot in 1984 and Hughes Aircraft in 1985, neither of which improved the vehicles. Saturn, launched in 1985 as a separate company with its own plant, union agreement and dealer network to build small cars in a new way, produced a well-regarded car and a loyal following but never earned back its investment. Smith's tenure was the subject of Michael Moore's 1989 documentary Roger and Me.
Crisis, bankruptcy and reorganisation, 1990 to 2010
The company lost approximately US$30 billion between 1990 and 1993, and the board removed Robert Stempel in 1992 in the first boardroom coup at a large American corporation in decades, an action led by the outside director John Smale of Procter and Gamble that is treated in the governance literature as the beginning of an era in which boards held chief executives accountable.
The following fifteen years brought partial recovery and continued erosion of market share, from about 35 per cent in 1990 to under 20 per cent by 2008. Profitability depended increasingly on large sport utility vehicles and pickups built on truck platforms, which were exceptionally profitable while fuel was cheap, and on GMAC, the finance subsidiary, which by the 2000s earned more than the car business and which had moved substantially into mortgage lending through Residential Capital.
The structural problem was cost. Decades of agreements had produced a workforce in which the company supported several retirees for each active worker, and healthcare and pension obligations added roughly US$1,500 to the cost of every vehicle relative to competitors whose American plants were new and whose workers were young. The jobs bank, under which laid-off workers received most of their pay indefinitely, prevented capacity reduction. Attempts to address this included the 2005 settlement with the union on healthcare, the 2006 buyouts that removed 35,000 workers, and the 2007 agreement creating a voluntary employee beneficiary association to assume retiree healthcare.
The company disposed of assets to fund losses, selling Hughes to News Corporation in 2003, Electronic Data Systems in 1996, 51 per cent of GMAC to Cerberus in 2006, and its stake in Fuji Heavy Industries, Suzuki and Fiat. It discontinued Oldsmobile, the oldest American marque, in 2004.
The collapse came in 2008. Fuel prices rose sharply in the first half of the year, destroying demand for the trucks on which profit depended, and the financial crisis then removed both consumer credit and the company's access to capital. GM burned through its cash within months. Its chief executive Rick Wagoner appeared before Congress in November 2008, arriving by private aircraft in a detail that shaped the reception of the request, and the outgoing administration provided emergency loans in December.
The incoming administration's Automotive Task Force required Wagoner's resignation in March 2009 and directed the company into a structured bankruptcy. General Motors Corporation filed for Chapter 11 on 1 June 2009, at the time the largest industrial bankruptcy in American history. Its viable assets were sold to a new entity, General Motors Company, owned by the United States Treasury, the Canadian and Ontario governments, the union's healthcare trust and the bondholders, with the remainder left in Motors Liquidation Company. The new company emerged on 10 July 2009, 40 days after filing.
The reorganisation eliminated approximately US$40 billion of liabilities, closed fourteen plants, terminated approximately 2,000 dealers and discontinued Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer and Saab, the last sold to Spyker and subsequently failing. The American government's assistance totalled approximately US$49.5 billion; it sold its final shares in December 2013 at a loss of about US$10.5 billion, which the Treasury and independent analyses set against the several hundred thousand jobs and the supplier base preserved.
Recovery and reorientation, 2010 to 2026
General Motors returned to public listing in November 2010 in what was then the largest initial public offering in American history.
Mary Barra became chief executive in January 2014, the first woman to lead a major global automaker, having joined the company at eighteen as a student at the General Motors Institute and worked as an engineer, plant manager and head of product development. She became chair in 2016.
Her tenure began with the ignition switch crisis. A defective switch fitted to the Chevrolet Cobalt and other small cars could move out of the run position, disabling the engine, power steering and airbags, and had been identified within the company as early as 2001 without being recalled. The recall in 2014 covered 2.6 million vehicles, and the defect was eventually linked to at least 124 deaths. An internal investigation by the former prosecutor Anton Valukas described a culture in which no one took responsibility and problems were referred indefinitely between committees, coining the phrase the GM nod for the practice of agreeing in a meeting without intending to act. The company paid a US$900 million penalty under a deferred prosecution agreement, established a compensation fund and dismissed fifteen employees.
Barra's strategic direction has been to withdraw from markets and businesses where the company could not earn an adequate return and to concentrate capital on North America, China and on electrification. GM sold Opel and Vauxhall to PSA Group in 2017, ending 88 years of European manufacturing; withdrew from Russia in 2015 and finally in 2022; ended manufacturing in Australia with the closure of Holden in 2017 and retired the marque in 2020; withdrew from India in 2017, from South Africa in 2017, from Indonesia and Thailand in 2020; and restructured its South Korean operations after a dispute with the Korean government in 2018.
In North America it discontinued a number of passenger cars in 2018 and 2019, closing plants at Lordstown, Oshawa and Detroit-Hamtramck, the last of which was subsequently reopened as Factory Zero for electric vehicles. The 2019 strike by the United Automobile Workers, lasting 40 days, was the longest against the company since 1970.
The electrification programme, announced in 2021 with a commitment to sell only zero-emission light vehicles by 2035, was built on the Ultium battery platform developed with LG and on three joint-venture cell plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Michigan. Products include the Cadillac Lyriq, Chevrolet Blazer EV, Equinox EV and Silverado EV, the Hummer EV and the GMC Sierra EV. The Chevrolet Bolt, an earlier and cheaper electric car, was withdrawn in 2023 after a battery fire recall that cost approximately US$1.9 billion, recovered largely from LG, and was subsequently announced for revival on the newer platform.
Production of the Ultium vehicles was slow to ramp, and GM, like its competitors, reduced and rephased its electric investment from 2024 as demand grew more slowly than forecast, reintroducing plug-in hybrids it had previously said it would not build. The removal of American federal purchase incentives in 2025 prompted a further reduction, including a charge of around US$1.6 billion and the cancellation of some capacity.
Cruise, the autonomous driving subsidiary acquired in 2016, operated driverless taxis in San Francisco and other cities until October 2023, when one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian who had been struck by another car, and the company's failure to disclose the full circumstances to regulators led California to suspend its permits. GM took full ownership, ceased the robotaxi programme at the end of 2024 after investing more than US$10 billion, and redirected the technology toward driver assistance in its own vehicles, where Super Cruise has become one of the more capable hands-free highway systems available.
The company has been notably profitable in the period, earning roughly US$10 to 14 billion before tax annually from full-size trucks and sport utility vehicles, and has returned very large sums through share buybacks, including an accelerated programme of US$10 billion announced in November 2023 immediately after the conclusion of a costly union settlement.
International history
Opel and Vauxhall
General Motors acquired 80 per cent of Opel in 1929 and the remainder in 1931, and had bought Vauxhall in Britain in 1925. Opel was the largest car manufacturer in Germany, and the acquisitions gave GM a European presence it held for almost ninety years.
Opel's wartime production for the German armed forces, including the Blitz truck, and the question of how far the American parent retained control after 1939 were examined in later litigation and historical inquiry; GM's position has been that control was lost when the company was placed under German administration in 1940, and researchers have disputed the extent of that separation.
Postwar, Opel and Vauxhall produced some of the best-selling cars in Europe, including the Kadett, Astra, Corsa, Vectra and Insignia, and GM Europe was at times the second largest manufacturer in the region. It was also persistently unprofitable, losing money in most years after 1999 and cumulatively many billions of dollars. GM attempted to sell Opel to Magna and Sberbank in 2009 and withdrew from the sale at the last moment, provoking anger in Germany, before selling both marques to PSA Group in 2017 for approximately €2.2 billion. PSA returned Opel to profit within two years, an outcome that was read as a comment on GM's management of it.
Holden
Holden began as a saddlery in Adelaide in 1856, became a body builder for imported chassis and was acquired by General Motors in 1931. The 48-215 of 1948 was the first car designed and built in Australia, promoted as Australia's own car, and Holden dominated the market for decades. Its rivalry with Ford's Falcon, expressed in the Bathurst 1000 touring car race, was a central feature of Australian popular culture.
The removal of tariff protection, the small scale of the domestic market and the rise of imports made local manufacture unviable, and production ended in October 2017. GM retired the marque entirely in 2020 and withdrew the Chevrolet brand from Australia and New Zealand soon after, ending a presence of ninety years and drawing criticism from the Australian government over the treatment of dealers.
Korea and Daewoo
General Motors acquired the assets of the bankrupt Daewoo Motor in 2002, creating GM Daewoo, which became GM Korea in 2011 and rebranded its products as Chevrolet. The Korean operation has supplied small cars to GM's global markets and has been a significant exporter, and its future has been contested repeatedly in negotiations with the Korean government and with the labour unions, most seriously in 2018 when GM closed the Gunsan plant and obtained government support to continue.
China
The Shanghai General Motors joint venture with SAIC began production in 1998, and SAIC-GM-Wuling followed in 2002. China became GM's largest market by volume, and Buick's position there sustained a marque that had lost relevance in the United States.
The business has deteriorated sharply since 2018. Chinese manufacturers, supported by state industrial policy and by an early and comprehensive move to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, have taken the majority of their home market, and foreign brands that once commanded a premium have lost it. GM's restructuring charge of more than US$5 billion in late 2024 acknowledged that the business as previously constituted would not return.
India, Russia and elsewhere
GM ended Indian sales in 2017 after two decades and continued to use the Talegaon plant for export before selling it. It suspended Russian assembly in 2015 and withdrew entirely in 2022. It closed operations in Indonesia in 2015 and again in 2020, ended manufacturing in Thailand in 2020 with the sale of the Rayong plant to Great Wall Motor, and ended South African manufacturing in 2017 with a sale to Isuzu.
The cumulative effect of these withdrawals is that a company which sold vehicles in almost every country in the world now operates substantially in North America, China through joint ventures, South America and Korea. The decisions were individually defensible on returns and collectively represent the abandonment of global scale, a position the company argues is realistic and its critics argue leaves it exposed to a single market and a single product category.
Relations with government
General Motors' relationship with the American government has been unusually close and unusually contested. Its scale made it a subject of antitrust attention from the 1930s, and proposals to break it into separate companies were considered seriously within the Justice Department in the 1950s; the company is generally understood to have restrained its market share to avoid the outcome.
The 2008 and 2009 rescue was the most significant intervention by the federal government in an industrial company since the Second World War. The Treasury took a 61 per cent stake, the Canadian and Ontario governments a further 12 per cent, and the company was directed by a presidential task force that required the removal of its chief executive and the terms of its reorganisation. The company was referred to in political debate as Government Motors, and the episode remains contested: supporters point to the preservation of the supplier base and of several hundred thousand jobs in a collapsing economy, and opponents to the loss to the Treasury, to the subordination of bondholders to the union's healthcare trust and to the precedent of an executive-directed bankruptcy.
The company has since been affected by government action on emissions standards, on the tax credits that supported electric vehicle purchases and their removal in 2025, on tariffs applied to imports from Mexico, Canada and China, and on the sourcing requirements attached to battery subsidies, each of which has materially altered the economics of decisions taken years earlier.
Competition
General Motors competes in North America with Ford and Stellantis, with the American operations of Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia, and with Tesla. In full-size trucks, its principal source of profit, the market is effectively shared between GM, Ford and Stellantis, protected by the chicken tax, a 25 per cent tariff on imported light trucks imposed in 1964 in retaliation for European duties on American poultry, which has kept foreign manufacturers from competing seriously in the segment for sixty years.
In China it competes with BYD, Geely, Chery, Great Wall and a large number of newer electric manufacturers, and has lost substantial share to all of them. Globally its exposure to Chinese competition is limited by its withdrawal from the markets those companies are entering, which is a consequence of its retrenchment rather than a strategy, and which leaves it dependent on the continuation of the tariffs that exclude those manufacturers from North America.
Marques
Current
Chevrolet, founded in 1911 and acquired in 1918, is the volume marque and the company's global brand, sold in North America, South America, the Middle East and Korea. Its range runs from the Trax and Trailblazer through the Equinox, Traverse and Tahoe to the Silverado pickup and the Corvette, which moved to a mid-engined layout in 2020 after 67 years with the engine in front.
GMC, dating from 1911 and originally a truck manufacturer, sells trucks and utility vehicles that share their engineering with Chevrolet equivalents but are positioned and priced above them. The Denali trim, introduced in 1999, has become one of the most profitable products in the industry, and the marque's existence, selling the same vehicle at a higher price to a different buyer, is among the clearest surviving demonstrations of Sloan's principle.
Cadillac, founded in 1902 by Henry Leland and acquired in 1909, is the luxury marque. It defined American luxury for most of the twentieth century, declined severely against the German marques and Lexus from the 1980s, and has been repositioned repeatedly. Its current direction places it at the front of the company's electrification, with the Lyriq, Optiq, Vistiq and the Celestiq, a hand-built car priced above US$300,000.
Buick survives principally because of China, where it has been sold since 1912, was favoured by the last emperor and by Sun Yat-sen, and carries prestige it lost in the United States. It was retained through the bankruptcy for that reason, and its Chinese volumes have for years exceeded its American ones.
Wuling and Baojun are sold through the SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture in China, which has been among the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world by units. The Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, launched in 2020 at a price around US$4,500, became the best-selling electric vehicle in China and demonstrated a market for very cheap short-range vehicles that Western manufacturers had not addressed.
Discontinued
Oldsmobile, founded in 1897 and the oldest American marque, was discontinued in 2004. Pontiac, acquired as Oakland in 1909, was discontinued in 2010. Saturn, created in 1985, Hummer, acquired in 1998 and revived as a Chevrolet and GMC model name in 2020, and Saab, acquired progressively between 1990 and 2000, were all ended in the bankruptcy. Holden, the Australian marque dating from 1856 as a saddlery and building cars from 1948, ended manufacture in 2017 and was retired in 2020. Opel and Vauxhall, owned from 1929 and 1925, were sold in 2017. Daewoo, acquired in 2002, was rebranded as Chevrolet in Korea in 2011.
Operations
North America
North America produces almost all of the company's profit. Assembly plants include Fort Wayne and Silao in Mexico for full-size pickups, Arlington in Texas and Silao for full-size sport utility vehicles, Flint for heavy-duty trucks, Spring Hill in Tennessee, Fairfax in Kansas, Lansing Grand River and Delta Township in Michigan, Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck, Wentzville in Missouri, Bowling Green in Kentucky for the Corvette, CAMI and Oshawa in Ontario, and Ramos Arizpe and San Luis Potosí in Mexico.
Full-size pickups and large sport utility vehicles are the source of the company's earnings. The Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra compete directly with the Ford F-Series, and the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade have no direct competitor at their size, since Ford's Expedition is smaller in volume and Stellantis has withdrawn from the segment; the Escalade in particular carries margins exceeding those of most luxury cars.
China
General Motors entered China in 1997 through a joint venture with SAIC Motor, and for many years sold more vehicles there than in the United States. Its Chinese business has contracted severely since 2018 as domestic manufacturers, particularly BYD, have taken share with electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles at prices foreign manufacturers cannot match. The company took a charge of more than US$5 billion in late 2024 to restructure the Chinese operations and has repositioned them around premium imports, Cadillac and the Wuling joint venture rather than around volume Buick and Chevrolet sales.
South America and other markets
Chevrolet remains a significant brand in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, with manufacturing at São Caetano do Sul, Gravataí and São José dos Campos in Brazil, though the operations have been restructured repeatedly. GM Korea builds vehicles at Bupyeong and Changwon, principally for export to North America, and the company's Middle Eastern business sells full-size American vehicles in markets where they are favoured.
GM Financial
GM Financial, formed from the acquisition of AmeriCredit in 2010 after the loss of GMAC in the bankruptcy, provides retail financing, leasing and dealer floorplan credit. It earns approximately US$3 billion before tax annually and is essential to the vehicle business, since a manufacturer without captive finance cannot offer subvented rates or lease terms and cannot fund dealer inventory. The loss of GMAC, which became Ally Financial and was rescued separately, was among the most damaging consequences of the crisis.
Defence and other businesses
GM Defense supplies militarised vehicles including the Infantry Squad Vehicle to the United States Army, drawing on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 platform. BrightDrop, launched in 2021, produces electric delivery vans and was folded into Chevrolet in 2024. OnStar, introduced in 1996, provides connected services including crash response and remote diagnostics and was among the first commercially significant applications of vehicle connectivity.
Technology
Electrification
The Ultium platform, developed with LG Energy Solution and introduced from 2021, uses large-format pouch cells arranged so that the same architecture can underlie vehicles from a compact crossover to a heavy-duty pickup. Cells are produced by Ultium Cells, a joint venture, at Lordstown in Ohio, Spring Hill in Tennessee and Lansing in Michigan, the last of which was subsequently sold to LG as the programme was rescaled.
GM was an early and then an intermittent participant in electric vehicles. The EV1, leased in California between 1996 and 1999 in response to that state's zero-emission vehicle mandate, was withdrawn and the vehicles were crushed, an episode examined in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?. The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid introduced in 2010, was an engineering success and a commercial disappointment. The Chevrolet Bolt of 2016 was the first affordable electric car with more than 200 miles of range, preceding the Tesla Model 3 to market.
Autonomy and driver assistance
Super Cruise, introduced on the Cadillac CT6 in 2017, permits hands-free driving on mapped divided highways using lidar-derived maps and a driver-attention camera, and has generally been rated the most capable system of its kind. GM has extended it across its range and has announced the intention to offer eyes-off driving on highways later in the decade.
Cruise, acquired in 2016, developed fully driverless vehicles and operated commercial robotaxi services before the 2023 incident that ended the programme. The technology and a substantial part of the engineering organisation were absorbed into GM's own development of personal autonomy, a redirection the company presented as a more realistic route to deploying the capability at scale.
Software
GM's connected vehicle platform and its move to remove Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its electric vehicles in favour of its own infotainment system, announced in 2023, attracted substantial criticism from customers and reviewers. The company's reasoning is that it cannot build a durable software and services business if the screen is controlled by a telephone, and that subscription revenue from software is essential to the economics of the transition; the counter-argument is that customers value the systems they already use and that the company's own software has not previously been of comparable quality.
Research and invention
General Motors Research, established in 1920 under Charles F. Kettering, was the first corporate research laboratory in the automobile industry and among the most consequential in any industry, for reasons both creditable and otherwise.
Kettering had invented the electric self-starter in 1911, introduced on the 1912 Cadillac, which removed the hand crank and with it the principal physical obstacle to driving, particularly for women, and which is among the small number of individual inventions that materially widened the market for a product. He also developed quick-drying lacquer finishes, which reduced paint drying time from weeks to hours and made the annual model change practicable, and contributed to the development of the diesel locomotive through GM's Electro-Motive Division, which displaced steam from American railways within two decades.
Two of the laboratory's discoveries caused enormous and lasting harm. In 1921 Thomas Midgley, working under Kettering, found that tetraethyl lead added to petrol suppressed engine knock, allowing higher compression ratios. General Motors, Standard Oil and DuPont formed the Ethyl Corporation to produce it, and it was marketed as Ethyl without reference to lead, despite workers at the production plants dying of lead poisoning within a year and despite a known non-toxic alternative in ethanol, which could not be patented. Leaded petrol remained in use worldwide for more than half a century, and the resulting exposure has been associated with measurable reductions in population-level cognitive function and with increases in violent crime, effects only fully characterised after its elimination, which was completed globally in 2021.
Midgley subsequently developed dichlorodifluoromethane, marketed as Freon, in 1930, which made domestic refrigeration and air conditioning safe and cheap and which, with the related chlorofluorocarbons, was found in the 1970s to destroy stratospheric ozone. The environmental historian J. R. McNeill observed that Midgley had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in the history of the planet.
Other GM contributions include the Hydra-Matic, the first fully automatic transmission fitted to a mass-produced car, introduced on the 1940 Oldsmobile; the catalytic converter, which GM was instrumental in bringing to production in 1975 and which required the elimination of leaded petrol from new vehicles, an outcome the company had spent fifty years resisting; early airbag systems, offered on Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac models from 1974 and withdrawn for lack of demand before becoming universal two decades later; and anti-lock braking, traction control and stability systems developed and introduced through the 1970s and 1980s.
The General Motors Institute, founded in 1919 to train engineers in Flint, became independent in 1982 and is now Kettering University; Mary Barra is among its graduates.
Design
General Motors created the first industrial design department in the automobile industry, the Art and Colour Section, under Harley Earl in 1927. Earl introduced the use of modelling clay to develop shapes in three dimensions, a practice now universal, and produced the Buick Y-Job in 1938, generally considered the first concept car, and the Le Sabre of 1951.
His influence over American taste in the 1950s was near-absolute. The tailfin, introduced on the 1948 Cadillac and derived from the Lockheed P-38, reached its apotheosis on the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado and was copied by every American manufacturer, and the Motorama travelling exhibitions, held between 1949 and 1961, presented concept vehicles to audiences of millions and functioned as a demonstration of the future that the company would sell.
Bill Mitchell succeeded Earl in 1958 and directed a change toward sharper, less ornamented forms, producing the 1963 Buick Riviera, the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray and the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Later design leaders included Irvin Rybicki, Chuck Jordan, Wayne Cherry, Ed Welburn, the first African American to lead design at a major manufacturer, and Michael Simcoe.
The design organisation's standing declined during the badge-engineering period of the 1980s, when the divisions' products became visually indistinguishable, and has been rebuilt since, with the Cadillac Art and Science language of the 2000s and the current electric vehicle designs generally well received.
Components and spin-offs
General Motors was for most of its history the most vertically integrated manufacturer in the world, producing a very large proportion of its own components. Its parts operations, including Delco, Harrison, Saginaw, Packard Electric and others, were consolidated as Automotive Components Group and then Delphi, which was separated in 1999 with approximately 200,000 employees.
Delphi, like Ford's Visteon, proved unable to support the wage and benefit structure inherited from its parent while selling components at market prices. It entered bankruptcy in 2005 and emerged in 2009 substantially smaller, with GM reacquiring the steering business and certain plants. The separations of Delphi and Visteon are generally regarded as attempts to transfer legacy costs that neither succeeded in doing so nor improved the competitiveness of the components businesses.
Other businesses the company has owned include Frigidaire, which it held from 1919 to 1979 and which made GM for a period the largest producer of domestic refrigerators in the United States; the Electro-Motive Division, which was the leading manufacturer of diesel locomotives in the world and was sold in 2005; Allison Transmission, sold in 2007; Detroit Diesel, sold in 1988; General Motors Defense, sold in 2003 and re-established in 2017; Hughes Aircraft and its satellite businesses; Electronic Data Systems; and National Car Rental.
ACDelco
ACDelco supplies replacement parts and is among the largest such businesses in the world, a legacy of the components operations that provides a stream of revenue from vehicles long after they are sold and that is considerably more profitable than manufacturing them.
The streetcar controversy
In the 1930s and 1940s General Motors, together with Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Trucks, funded National City Lines, a company that acquired streetcar systems in more than forty American cities and converted them to buses purchased from the participating companies. The parties were convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolise the sale of buses and supplies to the companies they controlled, and acquitted of conspiring to monopolise the transit systems themselves; the fines imposed were nominal.
The episode has been presented, most prominently in a 1974 report by Bradford Snell to a Senate subcommittee and subsequently in popular culture, as a deliberate destruction of American public transport in order to sell cars. Transport historians have generally regarded that account as overstated, arguing that streetcar systems were already failing for reasons including fixed fares, regulatory obligations, rising labour costs and the flexibility of buses, and that National City Lines accelerated a transition that was occurring regardless. That the participating companies acted to benefit their own products is not in dispute; the scale of the consequence is.
Advertising and culture
General Motors was for decades the largest advertiser in the United States. The phrase see the USA in your Chevrolet, sung by Dinah Shore on television from 1952, and the sequence baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, from 1975, are among the most recognised advertising lines in American history. Like a rock, used for Chevrolet trucks from 1991, and the various Cadillac campaigns positioning the marque as the standard of the world, have had comparable longevity.
The company's products occupy a substantial place in American culture: the Corvette, the Camaro, the Pontiac GTO and Trans Am, the Cadillac Eldorado and the Chevrolet Bel Air recur throughout popular music and film, and the Chevrolet Suburban, in production under the same name since 1935, is the longest-running automotive nameplate in the world.
Model history
The company's most significant products include the Chevrolet Series C of 1912; the Cadillac V8 of 1915, the first mass-produced V8; the Chevrolet Suburban of 1935; the Oldsmobile with Hydra-Matic of 1940; the Chevrolet small-block V8 of 1955, produced in some form into the twenty-first century; the Chevrolet Bel Air of 1955 to 1957; the Chevrolet Corvette from 1953; the Chevrolet Impala, which at its 1965 peak sold more than a million units in a year, a record for a single nameplate that stands; the Chevrolet Corvair of 1960; the Pontiac GTO of 1964; the Chevrolet Camaro of 1967; the Oldsmobile Cutlass, the best-selling car in America for much of the 1970s; the Chevrolet Caprice; the GM J-cars and A-bodies of the 1980s, which sold in enormous numbers and did lasting damage to the company's reputation for quality; the Chevrolet Suburban and Tahoe of the 1990s; the Cadillac Escalade of 1999; the Chevrolet Silverado; the Chevrolet Volt of 2010; the Chevrolet Bolt of 2016; and the current Ultium range.
Motorsport
General Motors has competed principally through Chevrolet and Cadillac. Chevrolet has been the most successful manufacturer in NASCAR history by wins and championships, and has supplied engines to IndyCar since 2012 in competition with Honda, winning multiple manufacturers' titles and Indianapolis 500 victories.
The Corvette Racing programme, operating since 1999, is among the most successful factory sports car efforts of the modern era, with class victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, at Daytona and at Sebring, and the Corvette C8.R and subsequent Z06 GT3.R have carried it into customer racing worldwide. Cadillac has competed in prototype racing since 2017, winning the Daytona 24 Hours repeatedly, and entered the top hypercar class at Le Mans from 2023. In 2026 Cadillac entered Formula One as a constructor in partnership with Andretti Global, using Ford power units initially and with the intention of producing its own from the end of the decade, the first American manufacturer to enter the championship as a works team in decades.
Corporate affairs
Governance and ownership
General Motors Company is incorporated in Delaware and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shareholder register is institutional, and the United Automobile Workers' retiree healthcare trust held a substantial stake after the bankruptcy which it has since sold. The company has no dual-class structure and no controlling shareholder.
Mary Barra has been chief executive since 2014 and chair since 2016. The combination of the roles has been questioned by governance specialists, and the company's board has generally supported it on the basis of performance.
The headquarters have occupied the Renaissance Center on the Detroit riverfront since 1996, having previously been at the General Motors Building on West Grand Boulevard. In 2024 the company announced that it would move to a new building at Hudson's Detroit and would work with the city on the redevelopment of the Renaissance Center, which has struggled to fill its office space, a decision with substantial implications for downtown Detroit.
Employees and labour
General Motors employs approximately 162,000 people. Its American hourly workforce is represented by the United Automobile Workers, with whom it has had a relationship since 1937 and which has generally been the most adversarial of the three Detroit companies' relationships.
The 2019 strike lasted 40 days and cost the company approximately US$3.6 billion. The 2023 settlement, following the union's simultaneous action against all three manufacturers, raised wages by 25 per cent over four years, restored cost-of-living adjustments, shortened the progression to top pay from eight years to three and brought battery plant workers under the master agreement, the last being the union's principal objective since those plants would otherwise have employed workers outside its contracts.
Outside the United States the company's workforce is covered by Unifor in Canada, by national arrangements in Mexico, Brazil and Korea, and through joint venture partners in China.
Finances
General Motors reported revenue of approximately US$187 billion in 2024. Earnings before interest and tax in North America have been in the region of US$12 to 14 billion annually, with GM Financial contributing roughly US$3 billion and international operations, principally China, contributing little or producing losses.
The company has pursued an aggressive programme of share repurchases, reducing its share count by roughly a fifth between 2023 and 2025, on the reasoning that its shares trade at a low multiple of earnings and that buying them is a better use of capital than additional investment in a market that is not growing. Critics argue that the practice returns to shareholders capital that the transition to electric vehicles will require.
Safety and recalls
The ignition switch
The defective ignition switch fitted to the Chevrolet Cobalt, Saturn Ion, Pontiac G5 and related vehicles was identified during development in 2001 and 2004 and was approved for production despite failing the company's own torque specification. A revised part was introduced in 2006 without a change of part number, which concealed the existence of two versions and delayed the investigation for years.
The recall of 2.6 million vehicles in February 2014 was followed by a compensation programme administered by Kenneth Feinberg which accepted 124 death claims and 275 injury claims, and by a deferred prosecution agreement under which the company paid US$900 million. The Valukas report, commissioned by Barra and published in full, described an organisation in which safety information did not reach decision-makers, in which committees deferred to one another, and in which employees had been instructed to avoid words such as defect and dangerous in written communications.
The episode produced a substantial increase in the number of recalls across the industry, as manufacturers became more willing to act on ambiguous evidence, and contributed to increases in the penalties available to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Other matters
The Corvair controversy of the 1960s, the side-saddle fuel tanks fitted to full-size pickups between 1973 and 1987, which were the subject of litigation and of a discredited NBC News demonstration in 1992, and the Chevrolet Bolt battery fires of 2020 and 2021 are the other principal safety controversies in the company's history.
GM has also been subject to emissions litigation, including claims concerning Duramax diesel engines, and to the general regulatory attention directed at manufacturers over fuel economy compliance.
Environment
General Motors has committed to eliminating tailpipe emissions from new light vehicles by 2035 and to carbon neutrality in its global products and operations by 2040. It sources renewable electricity for its American operations and has invested in lithium extraction, including an agreement with Lithium Americas for the Thacker Pass deposit in Nevada, and in cathode material production in North America, part of a general effort across the industry to reduce dependence on Chinese processing.
Its position on regulation has moved. The company supported the previous administration's challenge to California's authority to set its own emission standards in 2019 and withdrew from that litigation after the 2020 election, a reversal for which it was criticised by both sides. Its commitments have been rescaled as electric demand has grown more slowly than expected, and it reintroduced plug-in hybrids in 2027 model year products having previously announced it would not build them.
Assessment
General Motors was for most of the twentieth century the largest industrial company in the world and the model against which others organised themselves. The structure Sloan created, the marketing principles he set out and the labour settlement of 1950 shaped not only the automobile industry but the form of the modern corporation and of American industrial society.
Its decline was prolonged and had many causes, of which the most persistent was that the arrangements which made it successful in a market it dominated served it badly in one it did not. Its cost base assumed a share it no longer held, its divisional structure produced duplication once the divisions ceased to be distinct, and its scale made it slow.
Its present position is narrower and considerably more profitable than at any point since the 1990s. It earns very large sums from full-size trucks and sport utility vehicles in North America, has withdrawn from most markets where it could not earn a return, and has returned a great deal of capital to shareholders. The risks are the same as those facing its domestic rival: that its profit is concentrated in one product category in one market, that its Chinese business has been substantially lost to domestic competitors, and that the electric transition it committed to has proved slower, costlier and more contested than it assumed.
Timeline
Principal dates in the company's history include the incorporation of General Motors as a holding company on 16 September 1908; the acquisition of Oldsmobile in 1908 and of Cadillac and Oakland in 1909; the loss of Durant's control in 1910 and its recovery through Chevrolet in 1916; the founding of General Motors Acceptance Corporation in 1919 and of General Motors Research under Kettering in 1920; Durant's final departure in 1920; Sloan's presidency from 1923; the introduction of tetraethyl lead in 1923 and of Freon in 1930; the acquisition of Vauxhall in 1925 and Opel in 1929; the creation of the Art and Colour Section in 1927; the overtaking of Ford in 1931; the Flint sit-down strike and union recognition in 1937; the Hydra-Matic transmission in 1940; wartime production from 1942; the first Holden in 1948; the Treaty of Detroit in 1950; the Corvette in 1953; the small-block V8 in 1955 and the fifty per cent market share of the same year; the first billion-dollar profit; the Corvair and Nader controversy from 1960 to 1966; the Pontiac GTO in 1964; the catalytic converter in 1975; the introduction of front-wheel-drive volume cars from 1979; Roger Smith's chairmanship from 1981; the reorganisation of 1984 and the founding of Saturn in 1985; the acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems and Hughes Aircraft; losses exceeding US$30 billion between 1990 and 1993 and the removal of Stempel in 1992; the EV1 from 1996; the separation of Delphi in 1999; the acquisition of Daewoo in 2002; the discontinuation of Oldsmobile in 2004; the sale of a majority of GMAC in 2006; the 2007 labour agreement and the creation of the healthcare trust; the Chapter 11 filing on 1 June 2009 and emergence on 10 July; the discontinuation of Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer and Saab; the return to listing in November 2010; the Chevrolet Volt in 2010 and the Bolt in 2016; Mary Barra's appointment in January 2014 and the ignition switch recall in February; the acquisition of Cruise in 2016; the sale of Opel and Vauxhall in 2017 and the end of Indian and South African manufacturing in the same year; the end of Holden manufacture in 2017 and the retirement of the marque in 2020; the forty-day strike of 2019; the Ultium announcement and the 2035 commitment in 2021; the withdrawal from Russia in 2022; the ending of the Cruise robotaxi programme in 2024; the Chinese restructuring charge of 2024; and the entry of Cadillac into Formula One in 2026.
Corporate identity
The General Motors name has never been used as a vehicle marque; the company has always sold through its divisions, and the corporate name appears to consumers principally in warranty documents, in financial reporting and in political controversy. The square blue logo with the letters gm, introduced in 1964 and used in various forms since, was replaced in January 2021 by a lower-case version in a gradient of blues intended to evoke a plug and to signal the electric strategy, a redesign that attracted the usual quantity of comment and the usual absence of consequence.
The company's headquarters moved from the General Motors Building on West Grand Boulevard, a 1923 Albert Kahn structure that was the largest office building in the world when completed and that now houses Michigan state offices as Cadillac Place, to the Renaissance Center in 1996, and a further move to Hudson's Detroit was announced in 2024.