History of General Motors
The General Motor Company today consists of the automotive brand
names Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Oldsmobile, Hummer,
Saab, Vauxhall and Opel to name but a few. They control
operations in 32 countries and annually sell close to
9 million cars worldwide.
The oldest traceable element of the General Motors
Company (GMC) that exists today is the ‘Olds
Motor Vehicle Company’ which was founded in
1897, by Ransom E. Olds. Within its founding year,
the company had produced the first ‘Oldsmobile’.
The Olds Motor Company opened the first factory specifically
designed for automobile production in the whole of
the United States, in 1899. From the very outset Olds’
company was innovative and at the very forefront of
automobile manufacture. In 1901 the ‘curved
dash’ Oldsmobile became the first car in North
America to be manufactured in quantity.
The company began to expand relatively early on;
in 1909 the Cadillac company was acquired and included
in the company. Yet again 1910 saw the roots of the
GMC associated with innovation and modernisation.
It was in this year that the Cadillac strand of the
company offered the first ‘closed body’
feature as standard. Despite advances in manufacture
and design, it was around this time that the company
was actually facing a potential financial crisis,
and it was only when bankers stepped in, and the then
managing director Durant stepped down, that the company
was able to be saved.
The ‘crank’, which was the sole means
of starting a motor vehicle during the early twentieth
century, was soon phased out, once the electric self
starter was designed by Charles F. Kettering; the
self starter was featured in Cadillac’s from
1911. With the company progressing so soundly, expansion
beyond the American and Canadian markets seemed inevitable,
and in 1911 the General Motors Export Company was
organised, to deal with sales and production within
foreign markets. The company expanded even further
with the acquisition of the Chevrolet Motor Company
assets in 1918, and then in 1925 they branched out
into the British car manufacture sector with the Luton
based company ’Vauxhall’.
The twenties were in general a very prosperous and
profitable decade for GMC, yet they were unable to
avoid the repercussions of the depression. In 1929
the General Motor Company were planning to commission
a brand new luxury Viking V8 model car, but the slump
in general sales meant that by 1930 the venture had
been abandoned. Nonetheless, the company were eventually
able to recover, and by 1938 sales outside of Canada
and the United States were in excess of 350,000.
Once again international affairs had a huge impact
on the history of the General Motor Company; with
the entrance of the United States into the Second
World War, the GMC converted 100% of their production
to the war effort. They put a halt to all peacetime
production and began to produce aeroplane engines,
aeroplane parts, trucks, tanks, guns and shells. It
was also GMC that produced the famous DUKW or ‘Duck’
6x6 army truck. From innovations of the forties, the
GMC progressed to such modern developments as the
electric car, the IMPACT, which was debuted in 1990
in Los Angeles.
It was in 1996 that the GMC purchased their current
headquarters- the General Motor Renaissance Centre
in Detroit, from which this entire automotive empire
is controlled and developed to the extent that it
has now become one of the leading motor vehicle manufacturing
organisations in the world.
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