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Keith Crain is publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Peter Brown is associate publisher and editorial director
"Get a horse!" the crowd taunted. The year was 1902. Two teenage girls, frightened and caked with dust, were taking their first ride in an automobile. Author William Pelfrey recalls the moment in Billy, Alfred, and General Motors. The car was a long-forgotten French brand: Panhard. It was loud, and it sputtered as it chugged along a dirt...
Billy Durant was a builder and a buyer. He was an unparalleled entrepreneur, but he was not much of a businessman. He built Durant-Dort Carriage Co. into the world's largest producer of such conveyances. He was a millionaire before he was 40, and the fledgling automobile industry became his next world to conquer.
With the gasoline crises of the 1970s still fresh in many minds, Buick designer Bill Porter labored over the proportions of a new Buick Riviera, scheduled for mid-1980s introduction in dramatically downsized form. He wasn't happy about how the design was taking shape. Looking over the work, General Motors design chief Irv Rybicki said, "There's...
If you had to pick a B.C.-A.D. technological moment for the auto industry, Cadillac's introduction of the self-starter in 1912 wouldn't be a bad choice.
Roger Smith was a pop-culture punching bag in the late 1980s, but he gets some vindication in the survival of the Saturn brand -- one of his pet projects as chairman and CEO of General Motors from 1981 until his retirement in 1990. Smith died in November 2007 at age 82. He championed diversification -- the acquisitions of Electronic...
In the early 1980s, General Motors quietly negotiated an unprecedented deal: GM, the world's largest automaker, would build cars jointly with fast-rising challenger Toyota. Both parties had something to gain from the talks, which created New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., known as NUMMI. Toyota wanted to learn to build cars in the United States.
The creation of General Motors Acceptance Corp. in 1919 was nearly as revolutionary as the invention of the automobile itself. GMAC was the first finance company run by an automaker. Before GM established its captive, banks had lent consumers money for large purchases such as houses. But in his book My Years with General Motors, former GM...
The General Motors research and development organization grew from humble beginnings in a Dayton, Ohio, barn into one of the world's foremost scientific centers. From Charles Kettering's small laboratory, established in 1909, to the Dayton Research Laboratories, formed in 1916, to GM's first Detroit-based labs, set up in 1925, to facilities...
At age 50, all Pierre DuPont really wanted to do was work in his garden. After the financial success of his family's E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. during World War I, he certainly could have. The business already had been turned over to his younger brothers. Yet because of a large stake that was almost nonchalantly acquired, he got stuck as...
In 1920, Alfred Sloan wrote a long report about the best way to organize General Motors. He showed the report, titled "Organization Study," to GM President Pierre DuPont and CEO Billy Durant. DuPont was very impressed. Durant never reacted to it. Fast forward to 1923: Durant is out, and Sloan's Organization Study is in. Sloan was GM's president...
A sense of turmoil to come nagged at many of GM's senior managers in the winter of 1991-92. "You could kind of smell the anxiety," Jim Perkins, then general manager of GM's bread-and-butter Chevrolet division, recalled in a recent interview. "In a corporation like GM, you get a sense of things like that, the unrest. We knew that something big was...
J. Ignacio Lopez may have helped save General Motors from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. But the former purchasing chief embarrassed his friend, GM CEO Jack Smith, and was the cause of bitter accusations and lawsuits in Germany and the United States. It was all about saving money -- first for GM and then for Volkswagen Group.
The roots of General Motors' overseas subsidiaries reach back into the pre-automotive age to saddles, sewing machines, bicycles, marine engines and even mythical creatures and knights-errant. GM didn't become a global powerhouse overnight; it accumulated its far-flung empire piecemeal.
You don't hit the century mark as a car company without a strong dealer network. And General Motors recognized early on the importance of the people who bring car and driver together. Billy Durant was a dealer guy. So was Alfred Sloan. Compare them with their contemporaries at Ford Motor Co., who sometimes seemed determined to punish their...
When Harley Earl was a teenager, his family spent summers camping at Bailey's Ranch, in the mountains north of Los Angeles. When Earl was 16, the summer was particularly wet, and he fashioned a series of toy cars for himself and his younger brother from clay they found. "What Harley J. Earl began in the clay of Bailey's Ranch, he later shaped into...
The 1998 UAW strike at General Motors' Flint stamping operations was a disaster for the company. The 56-day strike shut all of GM's North American assembly plants. It cost the automaker about 500,000 vehicles and $2.8 billion in net losses. But both sides learned a valuable lesson: They resolved not to let miscommunication and intransigence cause...
Hopes were high when General Motors spun off its giant parts operation to create an independent Delphi Corp. in 1999. But it didn't take long for the enthusiasm to fade, says Don Runkle, Delphi's former vice chairman.
In 2001, with seven years left to go in General Motors' first century, CEO Rick Wagoner knew that his product lineup badly needed upgrading if the company was going to have a second hundred years. GM had lost its product mojo long before. GM's car lineup had the appeal of hospital food. With the possible exception of the Corvette, there wasn't a...
In 1936, workers at General Motors' vast manufacturing complex in Flint, Mich., felt beaten down. Production lines were running at speeds that exhausted the workers. Employees complained they weren't allowed bathroom breaks. Protests quickly brought threats of firing or other types of retaliation.
In April 2006, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner went before the board of directors. He sought two things: permission to raise cash by selling 51 percent of GM's finance arm, GMAC Financial Services, for $14 billion; and a vote of confidence in his leadership. He got both -- and the chance to move forward on the turnaround plan that is still a...
A bright light didn't suddenly flash above an engineer's head. And he didn't say "automatic transmission" and proceed to put one together. Development of that most useful of automobile accouterments was a long, slow process, marked by many failures. Contrary to popular belief, General Motors did not invent the automatic transmission. But GM...
It didn't take William S. Knudsen long to make up his mind. President Roosevelt needed him, so there was only one answer the General Motors president could give. In May 1940, the United States was still at peace, but war was raging in Europe. Knudsen, a Danish immigrant, gathered family members in his Detroit living room and announced he was...
Benefits such as health care began during World War II, when companies could not raise wages. They were an innovative way to bring union peace and attract good employees. General Motors began paying a small portion of employees' health care costs in the 1940s. They became a part of the collective bargaining process in the 1950s, and by 1964 all...
From 1949 to 1961, General Motors showed off its styling prowess at eight traveling extravaganzas -- lavish road shows that displayed each division's creativity, styling ideas, technology and optimism. Many of the fanciful ideas displayed at those eight shows found their way into production cars.
General Motors paid for the creation of the Center for Auto Safety, the watchdog group it has battled for several decades. Sounds outlandish, but it's true, says Ralph Nader, safety crusader and five-time presidential candidate. Nader set up the center with part of the $425,000 court settlement paid by GM in 1970 for invasion of his privacy.
