GM's founder was a horse-carriage king who once tried to buy Ford
By 1900 William Durant ran America's biggest maker of horse-drawn carriages and was not keen on cars. He took over Buick anyway, built General Motors around it in 1908, and a year later tried to buy Ford for 8 million dollars. The banks refused to lend him the deposit, and soon they pushed him out.
Durant borrowed the name General Motors from General Electric and went on a buying spree, adding Oldsmobile, Cadillac and the forerunners of Pontiac and GMC within a year. He borrowed too heavily, and in 1910 the bankers backing the company had the board remove him. Undeterred, he co-founded Chevrolet with the racing driver Louis Chevrolet in 1911, made it successful enough to regain control of GM in 1917, then lost it again in 1920 when Pierre du Pont replaced him with Alfred Sloan.
Sloan shaped how cars are still sold. He introduced yearly model changes, which made last year's car look dated and created a market for used ones, and arranged the brands in a price ladder from Chevrolet at the bottom through Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick up to Cadillac. He also created a styling department under Harley Earl, the first design chief appointed to leadership at a major American corporation. Some GM inventions aged badly: its engineer Thomas Midgley developed leaded petrol, later recognised as harmful, and the ozone-damaging chlorofluorocarbons.
Workers pushed back too. In the Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, which spread to several other plants, employees occupied factories until GM recognised the United Auto Workers as their bargaining representative. The settlement brought a 5 per cent raise and even permission to talk in the lunchroom.
GM's list of firsts is long: the first affordable automatic transmission in 1939, the first turbocharged production car in 1962, the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in 1966, and the Moon buggy it helped design with Boeing for 1971. It was the world's largest carmaker for 77 years until Toyota overtook it in 2008, and the present company emerged from bankruptcy reorganisation in 2009.
Source: General Motors
