General Motors

General Motors is an American automaker headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, that sells vehicles under the Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC brands. William C. Durant founded it in 1908, and in 2025 it reported about 155,000 employees and 6.18 million total vehicle sales worldwide.

History of General Motors

Durant founded General Motors in 1908 as a holding company that incorporated the Buick Motor Company. In 1909 it sold about 25,000 vehicles and bought Cadillac for $5.5 million. Within about two years Durant had added Oldsmobile, Oakland, which later became Pontiac, and the predecessors of GMC Truck.

The acquisitions left the company with about $15 million in debt, and in 1910 bankers took control from Durant. He founded the Chevrolet Motor Company in 1911, returned to lead GM in 1916 and brought Chevrolet into the company. In 1919 GM created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation to finance vehicle sales, and Durant’s leadership ended in 1920 after another bank buyout.

Alfred P. Sloan became president and chief executive in 1923. His restructuring balanced the independence of individual divisions with central management, and headquarters moved from Flint to Detroit. GM bought the British maker Vauxhall Motors in 1925 and expanded into several other countries. By the late 1920s it had passed Ford in sales.

Sit-down strikes by hourly workers in Flint in 1937 led to representation by the United Auto Workers. About 90 percent of GM’s truck production went to the war effort between 1917 and 1919, and the company’s share of the U.S. market reached 41 percent in 1941 and 54 percent in 1954. The Corvette arrived in 1953. U.S. employment peaked at 618,365 in 1979, making GM the country’s largest private employer.

The 1980s brought decline as foreign automakers gained market share. GM bought Electronic Data Systems for $2.5 billion in 1984 and launched Saturn in 1990. In 1991 it lost a record $4.45 billion and announced plans to close 21 plants. In the early 1990s chief executive Jack Smith cut costs and jobs, and later restructuring eliminated some product lines, including Oldsmobile.

Rick Wagoner replaced Jack Smith as chief executive in 2000. GM lost $38.7 billion in 2007, the largest annual loss in auto industry history, and in 2008 it received $13.4 billion in government aid after telling Congress it needed $18 billion. Wagoner was dismissed in March 2009, and a debt-for-equity swap failed in late May.

GM declared bankruptcy on June 1, 2009, and emerged in under 40 days as General Motors Company. The U.S. government sold its remaining GM stock on December 9, 2013. The next day Mary Barra became chief executive, the first woman to lead an automaker, and she was elected chairman in 2016.

Products and services of General Motors

GM’s four core brands are Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. Its joint ventures in China also market the Baojun and Wuling brands.

The company reports three segments: GM North America, GM International and GM Financial. GM Financial provides financing for vehicle purchases.

GM wholesaled 3.799 million vehicles in 2025, compared with 4.010 million in 2024 and 3.768 million in 2023. Wholesale counts vehicles sold to dealers. GM reports total vehicle sales separately, and in the United States they reached 2.853 million in 2025, up from 2.705 million in 2024 and 2.595 million in 2023. Worldwide total vehicle sales were 6.184 million in 2025. By simple division, 2025 wholesales were about 5 percent below 2024, while U.S. total vehicle sales were about 5 percent higher.

GM’s electrification push runs through Ultium Cells, a joint venture with LG Energy Solution. It makes battery cells at plants in Warren, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, for electric vehicles that use lithium-ion batteries.

In February 2025 GM acquired the remaining noncontrolling interests in Cruise, wound down its robotaxi operations and folded the autonomous technical work into GM North America. The company’s autonomous vehicle effort now sits inside its main North American business.

Corporate structure and operations

The present General Motors Company was incorporated in Delaware in 2009. Its headquarters is at 1240 Woodward Avenue in Detroit.

At the end of 2025 GM had about 155,000 employees worldwide. About 119,000 worked in GM North America, 28,000 in GM International and 9,000 at GM Financial. Roughly 88,000, or 56 percent, were hourly workers and 68,000, or 44 percent, were salaried.

Of the 2025 workforce, about 77 percent worked in North America and about 18 percent in the international segment, by simple division of the reported headcounts. The Chinese joint ventures sell vehicles under their own brands and are counted in GM’s worldwide total vehicle sales.

Impact of General Motors

Durant’s holding-company structure of 1908 gave GM a multi-brand model. Four of the brands he gathered or founded in those early years, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and the truck line that became GMC, remain its core brands in 2025.

The Detroit Historical Society records that GM passed Ford in sales in the late 1920s, after Sloan’s restructuring, and that after World War II it became the first American corporation to pay more than $1 billion in taxes.

The company’s size also made its 2008 and 2009 troubles a national policy question. The Detroit Historical Society says the federal rescue cost about $11 billion to $12 billion and saved more than a million jobs.

GM still competes with other global automakers such as Toyota, and its 2025 results show a business tied to both automobile sales in North America and a growing electric lineup.

Criticism and controversies

In September 2015 GM announced a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The agreement concerned GM’s handling of an ignition switch defect in certain older models and the related recall.

GM agreed to pay a $900 million financial penalty. Prosecution of the charges was deferred for three years, and the government agreed to seek dismissal if GM met the terms. GM also accepted an independent monitor to review its safety and recall policies.

Separately, GM established a victim compensation program, the GM Ignition Compensation Claims Resolution Facility, which it expected to pay more than $600 million in awards to people injured or to the families of those who died in accidents that may have been related to the switch.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue