General Motors is the second largest automaker in the world, founded in 1908 by William C. Durant in Flint, Michigan. The company has faced periods of success and difficulty, including being bailed out by the federal government in 2008. It employs over 250,000 people worldwide and has total assets of around $149 billion USD.
General Motors Corporation is the second largest automaker in the world, after Toyota. It was founded in 1908 by William C. Durant, in Flint, Michigan, and has always innovated in automotive technology. General Motors employs over 250,000 people worldwide with total assets of around $149 billion USD.
William C. Durant was one of the automobile pioneers. He was the son of Michigan Governor Henry H. Crapo and by the 1890s had a successful carriage business in Flint. In 1904, he was approached to become general manager for Buick, a position he wholeheartedly took on. He leveraged his success as manager of Buick to create a holding company in 1908, which he dubbed the General Motors Company. That company bought Oldsmobile, Cartercar, Ewing, Elmore, Cadillac, and the company that would eventually become Pontiac.
The following year, Durant acquired the Reliance Motor Truck Company and the Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, which would eventually become the basis of the General Motors truck. This entire purchase led to a rather large sum, around $1 million, held against Durant by the bankers who financed the company. As a result, Durant was ousted from leadership in 1910 and went on to form the Chevrolet company. Using the resources he created through Chevrolet, Durant organized a General Motors stock buyback and, in 1916, regained his position as General Manager, bringing Chevrolet with him. In 1920, Durant was permanently removed by Pierre S. Du Pont, who would remain largely under control until around 1950.
In the 1920s, General Motors Company expanded into a global market and built itself as a company that provided power, prestige and options. Unlike the Ford company, which focused on lower costs and lower prices, General Motors targeted consumers who had money to spend on products with more features. In the late 1920s and 1930s, General Motors helped create the Greyhound bus lines, largely replacing the existing rail system, and purchased streetcar companies to replace them with city buses.
During World War II, General Motors companies produced a large amount of weaponry and military vehicles, both for Allied and Axis forces. Although at the time the company tried to distance itself from the German company Opel, after the war it became evident that there was a concerted effort to profit from Germany’s need for trucks, landmines and torpedo detonators. General Motors Vice President Graeme K. Howard even expressed his pro-Nazi views in his book America and a New World Order.
After the war, General Motors continued to grow enormously, quickly becoming the largest corporation in the United States. This period of unabashed prosperity, during which General Motors chairman Charles Erwin Wilson was appointed Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, would last until the late 1950s. difficult period, where many of its products were plagued by poor workmanship, most notably the Chevrolet Corvair, about which Ralph Nader wrote his flagship book, Unsafe at Any Speed.
The 1980s and 1990s were a period of continued difficulties for General Motors, which was plagued by competition from Japanese companies. In the late 1990s, it finally appeared to be on the way to recovery, with inventory rising and sales stabilizing. Everything changed after September 11, 2001, when the company faltered again. Over the next few years, General Motors survived hardship after hardship, until the recession in 2008, when it seemed on the brink of bankruptcy and was finally bailed out by the federal government, leaving its future uncertain.
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