General Motors





General Motors is a United States-based automobile maker with worldwide
operations and brands including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Holden,
Hummer, Oldsmobile, Opel, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Vauxhall.

Chevrolet and GMC divisions produce trucks, as well. Oldsmobile is being
closed out in 2004. Other brands include Hughes Electronics (Directv),
ACDelco, Allison Transmission, and General Motors Electro-Motive Division
that produces diesel-electric locomotives. GM also has stakes in Isuzu,
Subaru, Suzuki, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, and Daewoo.

Headquarters are in Detroit, Michigan.

General Motors is the world's largest vehicle manufacturer and employs over
340,000 people. In 2002 GM sold 15% of all cars and trucks in the world.

The current Chairman (since May 1, 2003) and Chief Executive Officer (since
June 1, 2000) is Rick Wagoner. The previous one was John F. Smith, Jr.

History

General Motors was founded in 1908, aquiring Buick and Oldsmobile that year.

During the 1920s and 1930s General Motors bought out the bus company Yellow
Coach, helped create Greyhound bus lines, replaced intercity train transport
with buses, and established subsidiary companies to buy out tram (streetcar)
companies and replace the trams by buses. General Motors bought the train
engine maker Winton Engine in 1930, and shifted production from electric to
diesel engines. This encouraged the use of fossil fuels and made it
difficult to change social policies of energy generation.

It is a common belief popularized by Bradford Snell that General Motors was
convicted of conspiracy in the 1950s in their program to buy up and destroy
electric urban trolley systems so that urban transit would be forced to rely
on GMC buses and that this is the principal reason that modern-day trolley
systems are rare in the United States today. This belief has been questioned
by Sy Adler who points out that, among other things, that General Motors was
not convicted of buying up urban trolly systems but rather merely of forcing
bus companies owned by General Motors to use General Motors buses and that
trolley ridership peaked in the 1920 before GM's actions.

General Motors supported opposing sides during World War II. According to a
report presented to the United States Senate in 1974, during the 1920s and
1930s, General Motors (and Ford and Chrysler) expanded to many countries in
Europe, including Germany. They continued to supply trucks to both the US
military and the German military. The report claims that General Motors and
Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored "mule" 3-ton
half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich's medium and heavy-duty
trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served
as "the backbone of the German Army transportation system".

The chairman of General Motors at the time, Alfred P. Sloan, allegedly
defended this support of the German government, because GM's operations in
Germany at that time were "highly profitable".

After WWII, General Motors and Ford demanded reparations from the US
government for damage to their factories in Germany caused by Allied bombing.

On December 31, 1955 General Motors became the first American corporation to
make over one billion dollars in a year.

At one point it was the largest corporation in the United States ever, in
terms of its revenues as a percent of GDP.