History of General Motors
GM was initially created by combining independent manufacturers who were competing with the Ford Motor Company and vehicles offered before the October 1, 1908 introduction of the Model T (produced for 19 years until 1927).
[citation needed] During this period (and into the 30s), Sloan and his team established the practice of targeting each of GM's automotive divisions to a specific demographically and socio-economically identifiable market segment.
While Ford continued to refine the manufacturing process to reduce cost, Sloan was inventing new ways of managing a complex worldwide organization, while paying special attention to consumer demands.
In 1931, after purchasing remaining stake – General Motors took over the full control of Opel, making the company a wholly owned subsidiary, and over the next twenty years, diesel-powered locomotives—the majority built by GM—largely replaced other forms of traction on American railroads.
By the spring of 1939, the German Government had assumed day-to-day control of American owned factories in Germany, but decided against nationalizing them completely (seizing the assets and capital).
By mainstream accounts, General Motors' German subsidiary (Adam Opel AG) was outside the control of the American parent corporation during World War II.
Oldsmobile sales soared in the 1970s and 1980s (for an all-time high of 1,066,122 in 1985) based on popular designs, positive reviews from critics and the perceived quality and reliability of the Rocket V8 engine, with the Cutlass series becoming North America's top selling car by 1976.
Reorganizing the management structure to dismantle the legacy of Alfred P. Sloan, instituting deep cost-cutting and introducing significantly improved vehicles were the key approaches.
In the late 1990s, the U.S. economy was on the rise and GM and Ford gained market share producing enormous profits primarily from the sale of light trucks and sport-utility vehicles.
From June 1999 to September 2000, the Federal Reserve, in a move to quell potential inflationary pressures created by, among other things, the stock market, made successive interest rate increases, credited[by whom?]
General Motors' rising retiree health care costs and Other Post Employment Benefit (OPEB) fund deficit prompted the company to enact a broad restructuring plan.
On March 23, 2006, a private equity consortium including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Goldman Sachs, and Five Mile Capital purchased 78% of GMAC's (now Ally Financial) commercial mortgage arm, then called Capmark, for $8.8 billion.
During negotiations for the renewal of its industry labor contracts in 2007, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union selected General Motors as the "lead company" or "strike target" for pattern bargaining.
Late in September, sensing an impending impasse in the talks, the union called a strike, the first nationwide walkout since 1970 (individual plants had experienced local labor disruptions in the interim).
[46] On November 17, 2008, GM announced it would sell its stake in Suzuki Motor Corp. (3.02%) for 22.37 billion yen ($230 million)[47] in order to raise much needed cash to get through the 2008 economic crisis.
In 2008, 8.35 million GM cars and trucks were sold globally under the brands Vauxhall, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Daewoo, Holden, Pontiac, Hummer, Saab, Saturn, Wuling,[2] and Opel.
[126][127][128] In August 2011, GM announced plans to build a $150 million 190,300 square-foot plant in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, which would produce 40,000 passenger cars per year for the Southeast Asian market.
"Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told a congressional investigator that Germany could not have attempted its September 1939 Blitzkrieg of Poland without the performance-boosting additive technology provided by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motors".
[168][failed verification] During the war, GM's Opel Brandenburg plant produced trucks, parts for Ju 88 aircraft, land mines and torpedo detonators for Nazi Germany.
[19] Charles Levinson, formerly deputy director of the European office of the CIO, alleged in his book, Vodka-Cola extensive collaboration and information sharing between US and German divisions of General Motors during the war.
According to Sloan, GM in Detroit debated whether to even try to run Opel in the postwar era, or to leave to the interim West German government the question of who would pick up the pieces.
[170] But Opel was never factually nationalized and the GM-appointed directors and management remained unchanged throughout the war, dealing with other GM companies in Axis and Allied countries including the United States.
[171] In April 1939,[172] defending the German investment strategy as "highly profitable", Alfred P. Sloan had told shareholders that GM's continued industrial production for the Nazi government was merely sound business practice.
In a letter to a concerned shareholder, Sloan said that the manner in which the Nazi government ran Germany "should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors....We must conduct ourselves as a German organization.… We have no right to shut down the plant.
That same year, a senior GM executive wrote that “the management of Adam Opel A.G. is in the hands of German nationals,” while also noting that it was still “actively represented by two American executives on the Board of Directors.”[172] In April 1941, Walter Carpenter, a GM board member and vice president of DuPont, advised Sloan, who used South America as a way of keeping business relations with Nazi Germany following U.S. sanctions against the country, to end the business relations, stating "If we don’t listen to the urgings of the State Department in this connection, it seems to me just a question of time ...
The effect on the General Motors Corporation might be a very serious matter and the feeling might last for years.” Around this time, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle would successfully urge the FBI to investigate GM.
410–412, compiled by Robert C. Fellmeth, Center for Study of Responsive Law, and put forth by Bradford Snell again in 1974, in which GM, along with road-builders, is alleged to have engaged in a policy that triggered the shift from the mass transportation of the previous century to the 'one-person-one-car' trip of today.
[174] The theory states that in order to expand auto sales and maximize profits GM bought local mass transit systems and privately owned railways, following which it would proceed to eliminate them and replace them all with GM-built buses.
The hearings led to legislation which created the United States Department of Transportation and predecessor agencies of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration later that year.
This book, which critics acclaimed "blows the lid off the king of carmakers" was about the allegations of corruption, "mismanagement and total irresponsibility" at the top level of the company, as seen by John Z. DeLorean, the vice-president, who, in 1973, resigned from his position in spite of a brilliant and meteoric rise.
