General Motors Company
Automotive ManufacturingFounded 1908- Updated June 2026
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: June 2026
CorpDigest
General Motors Company
Company History
Founded 1908 in Detroit, Michigan
Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 · By Swet Parvadiya
Founded in 1908 by the irrepressible entrepreneur William C. Durant in Flint, Michigan, General Motors was conceived not as a single car company but as a holding company for automobile brands at a moment when the industry was still raw, chaotic, and wide open. Founded in 1908 by William C. Durant, GM survived a government-assisted bankruptcy in 2009 and has since undergone sweeping strategic transformation under CEO Mary Barra, including a multi-billion-dollar commitment to electric vehicles through the Ultium battery platform and autonomous driving through the Cruise subsidiary. Rising interest rates in 2022 through 2024 created both opportunity — higher yields on new originations — and risk, as affordability constraints reduced the pool of qualified borrowers and elevated delinquency rates in subprime segments. GM's OnStar connected vehicle platform, launched nearly three decades ago, has generated proprietary data on driving behavior, vehicle performance, and consumer preferences that informs product development, pricing, and service design in ways that newer entrants cannot easily replicate.
He immediately began building a new automotive empire, partnering with the Swiss-born race car driver and engineer Louis Chevrolet to found the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in 1911.
William C. Durant is one of the most consequential and tragic figures in American business history. His ability to see the automobile industry's consolidation potential before almost anyone else, and his courage to act on that vision at enormous personal financial risk, created the largest industrial corporation of the 20th century. Yet his management style — intuitive, relationship-driven, deeply suspicious of the bureaucratic controls that modern corporations require — repeatedly led him into financial crises that cost him control of his own creation. After his second and final removal from GM in 1920, Durant formed Durant Motors and attempted to build another automotive empire, but without the assets and market position of GM, the venture struggled through the 1920s and collapsed in the Depression. He spent his final years in Flint, where he had started, operating a bowling alley and remaining remarkably cheerful about his circumstances despite having lost a personal fortune estimated at more than $100 million. He died in 1947, remembered as the man who built General Motors.
William C. Durant incorporates General Motors in Hudson, New Jersey, on September 16, 1908, with Buick Motor Company as its primary asset. The founding vision is to create a holding company that can aggregate multiple automobile brands and suppliers under unified ownership.
GM acquires Oldsmobile and the prestigious Cadillac Automobile Company, establishing the multi-brand architecture that will define GM's market segmentation strategy for decades. Cadillac's reputation for quality and precision manufacturing gives GM immediate credibility in the luxury segment.
Alfred P. Sloan takes the GM presidency and begins implementing the decentralized divisional management structure and market segmentation strategy that transforms GM into the world's most admired corporate organization. His 'a car for every purse and purpose' philosophy creates a coherent brand ladder from Chevrolet to Cadillac.
General Motors overtakes Ford Motor Company as the world's largest automobile manufacturer by sales volume, a position it would hold for the majority of the next seven decades. The milestone reflects the success of Sloan's multi-brand strategy against Ford's single-model approach.
GM establishes Saturn as a separate subsidiary intended to compete with Japanese small cars through innovative labor relations, retail practices, and manufacturing processes. Saturn represents GM's most ambitious attempt to respond to quality and cost challenges posed by Toyota, Honda, and other Japanese manufacturers.
GM introduces OnStar, the world's first embedded cellular connected vehicle service, offering emergency assistance, stolen vehicle tracking, and remote diagnostics. The service launches in select Cadillac models and eventually expands across the GM lineup, establishing a connected services platform that serves more than 16 million vehicles by 2024.
General Motors files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 1, 2009, with $49.5 billion in U.S. Government assistance as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The company emerges from bankruptcy in just 40 days as a restructured 'new GM,' having eliminated Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands and renegotiated labor agreements with the UAW.
General Motors returns to public markets through an initial public offering on November 18, 2010, raising approximately $23.1 billion — at the time one of the largest IPOs in U.S. History. The offering allows the U.S. Treasury to begin recovering its bailout investment and reestablishes GM as an independently financed public company.
Mary Barra, a 33-year GM veteran with a background in engineering and manufacturing, becomes CEO on January 15, 2014, becoming the first female CEO of a major global automaker. She immediately faces the ignition switch recall crisis, which she navigates with a public commitment to transparency and cultural change that defines her leadership tenure.
GM acquires Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle startup, for approximately $1 billion — at the time one of the largest acquisitions in GM's modern history. The deal signals GM's commitment to autonomous driving technology and establishes Cruise as its dedicated AV development subsidiary.
GM announces its commitment to invest more than $35 billion in electric and autonomous vehicles through 2025 and introduces the Ultium battery platform as the technological foundation for dozens of future EV models across all four U.S. Brands. The announcement represents the most ambitious electrification commitment in GM's history.
Following the October 2023 Cruise pedestrian incident, GM takes approximately $1.9 billion in Cruise-related charges, replaces Cruise leadership, and pauses robotaxi operations for comprehensive safety review. Simultaneously, GM's China joint ventures report losses for the first time in years, prompting restructuring actions to right-size Chinese operations against domestic EV competition.
GM acquired AmeriCredit, a Fort Worth, Texas-based auto finance company specializing in non-prime consumer vehicle loans, to establish a captive finance subsidiary that would underpin vehicle sales financing after the bankruptcy-era sale of General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC, later renamed Ally Financial). Without a captive finance arm, GM was dependent on third-party lenders to finance consumer vehicle purchases, creating a competitive disadvantage relative to Ford Credit and Chrysler Financial. The AmeriCredit acquisition provided GM with immediate access to an established auto lending infrastructure, a portfolio of existing loans, and the expertise to originate and service consumer vehicle financing at scale.
GM's acquisition of Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle startup founded by Kyle Vogt and Dan Cantu in 2013, represented GM's most significant strategic bet on the autonomous vehicle future and its attempt to compete with Waymo, Tesla, and other technology companies developing self-driving systems. Cruise had developed a software-defined autonomous driving system designed to be integrated into existing vehicle platforms, which aligned well with GM's manufacturing capabilities and provided a faster path to commercial deployment than building AV technology from scratch. The acquisition signaled CEO Mary Barra's conviction that autonomous vehicles would be a defining competitive battleground for major automakers.
William C. Durant's consolidation of Buick Motor Company as the founding asset of General Motors established the business model and organizational template for the entire GM enterprise. Durant had taken operational control of the struggling Buick company in 1904, transformed it into one of America's best-selling cars, and used the brand's success and cash flow as the primary currency for financing the broader GM acquisition strategy. Buick was not so much acquired at founding as it was the cornerstone asset that attracted investment and credibility for the larger holding company structure Durant was assembling.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, General Motors acquired or established ownership positions in dozens of parts suppliers and component manufacturers as part of its strategy for vertical integration, following Alfred Sloan's systematic approach to securing supply chain control and reducing dependence on external suppliers. These acquisitions included the Fisher Body Company (acquired for approximately $208 million in 1926), AC Spark Plug, Champion Spark Plug, and numerous bearing, glass, and electrical component manufacturers. The vertical integration strategy was intended to ensure supply reliability, capture component manufacturing margins within the GM corporate structure, and enable more rapid product development through tighter integration between vehicle design and component production.
William C. Durant was removed from General Motors leadership twice, first in 1910 when a banking consortium led by Lee, Higginson & Company extended a $15 million rescue loan on the condition that he step aside, and again in 1920 after the postwar downturn. Between those exits he engineered his 1916 return by leveraging the success of Chevrolet, which he had co-founded in 1911. He never regained control after 1920 and later managed a bowling alley in modest circumstances.
General Motors surpassed Ford Motor Company as the world's largest automobile manufacturer by sales volume in 1931, a position it would hold for most of the following seven decades. The milestone validated Alfred Sloan's multi-brand, multi-price-point strategy against Ford's reliance on the single Model T line.
At its postwar peak General Motors commanded nearly 60 percent of the entire United States automobile market and accounted for more than 3 percent of total U.S. gross domestic product. That scale made GM the most powerful industrial corporation in 20th-century America before its share eroded through the 1970s and 1980s.
GM founded Saturn Corporation in 1984 as a standalone subsidiary designed to counter Japanese small-car competitors like Toyota and Honda through new labor agreements, retail practices, and manufacturing processes. The experiment aimed to rebuild GM's competitiveness in the compact segment, but Saturn was ultimately discontinued during the 2009 bankruptcy restructuring.
Under CEO Mary Barra, GM sold its European Opel and Vauxhall operations to PSA Group for approximately $2.3 billion in a deal completed in August 2017, ending roughly 90 years as a volume manufacturer in Europe. The European business had lost money for more than a decade, and the exit freed capital for North American core operations and electric vehicle investment.