GENERAL MOTORS CORPORATION

(GM), American corporation that was the world's largest automotive manufacturer and perhaps its largest industrial corporation throughout most of the 20th century. It was founded in 1908 to consolidate several motorcar companies and today operates manufacturing and assembly plants and distribution centres throughout the United States and Canada and many other countries. Its major products include automobiles and trucks, a wide range of automotive components, engines, and defense and aerospace matriel. A GM financial and insurance group finances and insures the installment sales of GM products. The company's headquarters are in Detroit, Mich. As organized by William C. Durant, a wealthy carriage maker and Buick investor of Flint, Mich., the General Motors Company from 1908 to 1911 initially consolidated firms producing Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland (later Pontiac), Ewing, Marquette, and other autos, as well as Reliance and Rapid trucks. GM introduced the electric self-starter commercially in its 1912 Cadillac, and this invention soon made the hand crank obsolete. GM remained based in Detroit and was reincorporated and acquired its current name in 1916. The Chevrolet auto company and Delco Products joined the corporation in 1918, and the Fisher Body Company and Frigidaire in 1919 (the latter was sold in 1979). Durant was forced out of the company in 1920 and was succeeded by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., who served as president (192337) and then as chairman of the board of directors (193756). Sloan reorganized GM from a sprawling, uncoordinated collection of weak business units into a single enterprise consisting of five main automotive divisions (Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet) whose activities were coordinated by a central corporate office equipped with large advisory and financial staffs. The various operating divisions retained a substantial degree of autonomy within a framework of overall policy; this decentralized concept of management became a model for large-scale industrial enterprises in the United States. Sloan also greatly strengthened GM's sales organization, pioneered annual style changes in car models, and introduced innovations in consumer financing. By 1929 General Motors had passed the Ford Motor Company to become the leading American passenger-car manufacturer. By 1941 it was making 44 percent of all the cars in the United States and had become one of the largest industrial corporations in the world. The company added overseas operations, including Vauxhall of England in 1925, Adam Opel of Germany in 1929, and Holden's of Australia in 1931. The Yellow Truck & Coach Manufacturing Co. (now GMC Truck & Coach Division), organized in 1925, was among the new American divisions and subsidiaries to be established. General Motors grew along with the American economy in the 1950s and '60s and continued to hold 4045 percent of total U.S. automotive sales. It bought Electronic Data Systems Corporation, a large data-processing company, in 1984 and acquired the Hughes Aircraft Company, a maker of weapons systems and communications satellites, in 1986. Along with other American automobile manufacturers, the company faced increasingly severe competition from Japanese automakers in the 1970s and '80s, and in 1984 GM began a new automotive division, Saturn, that used highly automated plants to produce subcompact cars to compete with Japanese imports. GM's efforts to modernize itself proved only partly successful, however, and in the early 1990s the company was forced to close a substantial number of plants in the United States and reduce its workforce by tens of thousands after several years of unprecedented heavy losses. Like other American automakers, however, GM had made a robust recovery by the middle of the decade. It sold Electronic Data Systems in 1996, and in 1997 it sold the defense units of its Hughes Electronics subsidiary to the Raytheon Company, thus leaving the computer-services and defense-aerospace fields in order to concentrate on its automotive businesses.