General Motors

• 1. Introduction

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  General Motors held the title of largest automaker in the world for 77 years before losing it to Toyota in 2008. That reign began in 1931, when GM overtook Ford Motor Company, and it lasted longer than any rival has managed since. The company traces back to a holding company for Buick, set up on the 16th of September 1908 by a man who had spent years insisting he disliked automobiles. From that single brand grew an empire that now owns Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac, runs plants in eight countries, and is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. How does a horse-drawn carriage maker end up here? How did the same company invent leaded gasoline, build the vehicle that drove on the Moon, and then file for bankruptcy in 2009? And why did it crush nearly every one of its own electric cars? Those questions sit at the center of one of the strangest corporate stories in America.

• 2. The Durant Empire

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  By 1900, William C. Durant ran the Durant-Dort Carriage Company of Flint, Michigan, the largest maker of horse-drawn vehicles in the country. Durant was averse to automobiles. Another Flint businessman, James H. Whiting of Flint Wagon Works, changed his mind by selling him the Buick Motor Company in 1904. Durant borrowed the naming convention for General Motors from General Electric, then built a buying spree. After Buick came Olds Motor Works on the 12th of November 1908, followed in 1909 by Cadillac, Elmore, Welch, Cartercar, Oakland, and the firms that became Pontiac and GMC. In 1909, Durant tried to buy Ford Motor Company for $8 million, but the banks refused to lend him the $2 million down payment. He had over-leveraged the company badly. In 1910, the board removed him at the order of the bankers backing the loans, a move partly driven by the Panic of 1910 to 1911. Durant did not stay gone. In November 1911 he co-founded Chevrolet with race car driver Louis Chevrolet, who walked away in 1915 after a disagreement. By 1917, Chevrolet had grown successful enough that Durant, backed by Samuel McLaughlin and Pierre S. du Pont, reacquired a controlling stake in GM. His second tenure ended the way his first did. In 1920, du Pont orchestrated his removal once more, this time replacing him with Alfred P. Sloan.

• 3. The Sloan Playbook

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  Alfred P. Sloan took over a company locked in heavy competition with Ford, and he changed the rules of selling cars. Sloan established annual model changes, which made previous years' models feel dated and created a market for used cars. He also set a pricing ladder still used today, running from Chevrolet up through Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick to Cadillac, cheapest to most expensive. Under Sloan's encouragement, GM acquired Vauxhall Motors for $2.5 million in 1925 and bought 80% of Opel in 1929, when Opel held a 37.5% market share in Europe, for $26 million. Sloan also reshaped how cars looked. After the success of the 1927 Cadillac LaSalle designed by Harley Earl, Sloan created the Art and Color Section and named Earl its first director. Earl was the first design executive appointed to leadership at a major American corporation. He recruited Bill Mitchell to the team at age 24, later naming him Chief Designer of Cadillac, and Mitchell took over GM design after Earl retired in December 1958. Sloan's politics cast a long shadow. As head of GM he was an ardent opponent of the New Deal, and he admired and supported Adolf Hitler.

• 4. Inventors And Engineers

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  In 1921, Thomas Midgley Jr., an engineer at GM, discovered tetraethyllead as an antiknock agent. GM patented the compound because ethanol could not be patented. The discovery enabled higher compression engines with more power and efficiency. The public later learned that the lead in the gasoline harmed living organisms, including humans, and evidence shows corporate executives understood the health implications from the beginning. Midgley also developed chlorofluorocarbons, now banned for depleting the ozone layer. Charles F. Kettering of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company shaped GM just as deeply. In 1911, Kettering and Henry M. Leland invented and patented the first electric starter in America. Walter E. Jominy and A.L. Boegehold of GM invented the Jominy end-quench test for the hardenability of carbon steel in 1937, a method still used today as ASTM A255. The firsts kept coming. In 1939, GM introduced the Hydramatic, the first affordable and successful automatic transmission, for the 1940 Oldsmobile. In 1962, GM put out the first turbocharged production car in the world, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Turbo-Jetfire. In 1973, the Oldsmobile Toronado became the first retail car sold with a passenger airbag, and GM installed its first catalytic converters in its 1975 models. The boldest leap reached beyond Earth. In partnership with Boeing, GM's Delco Defense Electronics Division designed the Lunar Roving Vehicle that traversed the surface of the Moon in 1971.

• 5. War And Diversification

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  During World War II, all of GM's production was turned to support the war by 1942. The company's William S. Knudsen served as head of U.S. wartime production for President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. GM's Vauxhall Motors built the Churchill tank series for the Allies, useful in the North African campaign, and the Eastern Aircraft Division ran five plants assembling Grumman-designed aircraft for the allied navies. The picture was not clean. GM's Opel division in Germany supplied the Wehrmacht with vehicles such as the Opel Blitz. Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer allegedly said in 1977 that Hitler would never have considered invading Poland without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors. After the war, GM was compensated $32 million by the U.S. government because its German factories were bombed by U.S. forces. The company spread far beyond cars. In 1984, GM acquired Electronic Data Systems for $2.5 billion from Ross Perot, part of CEO Roger Smith's plan to draw at least 10% of revenue from non-automotive sources. The deal made Perot the largest shareholder, but disagreements led GM to buy out all his shares for $750 million in 1986. In 1985, GM acquired the Hughes Aircraft Company for $5 billion in cash and stock. It later bought a controlling interest in North American Aviation and, in 1989, half of Saab Automobile's car operations for $600 million.

• 6. The Electric Car Story

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  In 1990, GM debuted the EV1, then called the Impact, a battery electric vehicle shown at the LA Auto Show. It was the first zero-emissions car marketed in the United States in over three decades. The Impact reached production as the EV1 for the 1996 model year, available only by lease from certain dealers in California and Arizona. Then GM reversed course. Between 1999 and 2002, the company stopped production and declined to renew the leases, disappointing many drivers, allegedly because the program would not be profitable and would cannibalize existing business. Every EV1 was returned to GM. Except for around 40 donated to museums with their electric powertrains deactivated, all were destroyed. The documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car? covered the saga. GM did not abandon the idea entirely. The EV1's lineage traced back to the Sunraycer, built with AeroVironment in 1987, which won the inaugural World Solar Challenge. Decades later GM returned to electrification. It delivered the first Chevrolet Volt, an extended-range electric vehicle, in December 2010. In October 2016 it began producing the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the first mass-market all-electric car with a range over 200 miles, with battery and drivetrain components built by LG Corporation. The hydrogen path went further back still. GM released the Electrovan in 1966, the first hydrogen fuel cell car ever produced, powered by a fuel cell supplied by Union Carbide.

• 7. Bankruptcy And Bailout

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  In March 2009, after GM had received $17.4 billion in bailouts without a turnaround, President Barack Obama forced the resignation of CEO Rick Wagoner. General Motors filed for a government-backed Chapter 11 reorganization on the 8th of June 2009. On the 10th of July 2009, the original company sold assets and subsidiaries, including the trademark General Motors, to an entirely new company. The liabilities stayed with the original firm, renamed Motors Liquidation Company. Through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the U.S. Treasury invested $49.5 billion in GM and recovered $39 billion when it sold its shares on the 9th of December 2013, a loss of $10.3 billion. A study by the Center for Automotive Research found the bailout saved 1.2 million jobs and preserved $34.9 billion in tax revenue. Emerging from bankruptcy meant shedding brands. Starting in June 2009, GM moved to drop Hummer, Saab, Saturn, and Pontiac. A deal to sell Hummer to a Chinese firm fell through, and GM shut the brand down in April 2010. Plans to sell Saturn to the Penske Automotive Group collapsed, and the brand was declared defunct in October 2010. The last Pontiac was built in January 2010. Saab was sold to Dutch automaker Spyker Cars in February 2010, then declared bankruptcy in 2012. Edward Whitacre Jr., who had restructured AT&T, was appointed chairman to steer the company out of bankruptcy, which it exited in July 2009 after 40 days of protection.

• 8. The Barra Era

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  On the 15th of January 2014, Mary Barra was named chief executive officer, succeeding Daniel Akerson. Only three weeks later, the company announced a recall over faulty ignition switches linked to at least 124 deaths, with settlements estimated at $1.5 billion. In May 2014 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined GM $35 million, the maximum it could impose, for failing to recall the cars for a decade despite knowing of the problem. The recall covered about 2.6 million cars worldwide. Under Barra, GM chased the future and then trimmed its ambitions. The company invested $500 million in Lyft in January 2016 and acquired the San Francisco self-driving startup Cruise in March 2016. After an incident involving an injured pedestrian, GM halted funding of the robotaxi business in December 2024, and in February 2025 merged Cruise into GM to focus on its Super Cruise system. On the 28th of January 2021, GM announced it would end production of fossil-fuel vehicles by 2035 as part of a plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2040, with a logo and the tagline EVerybody in. Those plans were scaled back in 2025, which GM attributed to a lack of customer demand. In October 2024 the company raised its commitment to Canadian miner Lithium Americas from $650 million to $945 million for the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. On the 15th of April 2024, GM announced it would move its global headquarters from the Renaissance Center to the nearby Hudson's Detroit development, beginning official occupancy of the site as of the 12th of January 2026.