General Motors produces vehicles under the Buick; Cadillac; Chevrolet; Holden; Hummer; Opel; Pontiac; Saab; Saturn, and Vauxhall brands. It also owns the Oldsmobile brand (now defunct).

If GM and Toyota could switch health-care costs, GM could generate an additional five new products per year. That's a quote from David Cole, chairman of Ann Arbor, Michigan's Center for Automotive Research.

2005 goes down as the worst year in General Motors history, as the company loses $10.4 billion. That loss is narrowed to $2 billion in 2006, as the automaker pays 34,400 union workers to leave; closes plants, and sells assets that raise about $16 billion.

In the first nine months of 2006, General Motors loses $3.03 billion.

GM's cuts are not limited to America. In 2007, the company announces plans to cut 1,400 jobs at its Antwerp, Belgium factory, mostly through attrition.

The European Commission places General Motors ninth, down from third, in a 2007 list of Research and Development spending.

General Motors beats market expectations to earn a third straight quarterly profit in the second quarter of 2007, turning a net profit of $891 million from April through June 2007, versus a loss of $3.4 billion in the same period of 2006.

Surpisingly, in among the worst months in recent memory, GM in September 2008 sees a sales drop of "just" 15.6% (versus 32.3% for Toyota), and posts its highest monthly market share of the year, at 27%.


Celebrated General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz retires on May 1^st, 2010, ending a 47-year career in the auto industry. Lutz, 78, has worked at GM, BMW, Chrysler, and Ford.

Speaking at Geneva 2010, Lutz said, "I can confidently say that the job I came here to do more than nine years ago is now complete. The team I have been fortunate to lead has far exceeded my expectations.

"Our product line-up is as strong as it has been in GM's history. The perception of our products and brands is beginning to catch up with reality.

"And most importantly, the absolute commitment to being a product-driven company is ingrained throughout the organization - from the top down - and I am confident that, under Ed Whitacre's leadership, the straightforward, singular focus on product will endure."

GM CEO Rick Wagoner announced on June 3^rd, 2008, that GM was considering selling Hummer, which saw sales fall 60.2% in May 2008 (over May 2007), and 36% for the year.


In 2007, after having been Number 1 for 76 years, General Motors looks likely to lose its position as the global car and truck sales leader. It bears noting that Toyota controls its protectionist home market - Japan - and that GM cannot expect to compete effectively in such a market after having sold its stakes in Japanese automakers Isuzu; Subaru, and Suzuki.


In 2006, General Motors shares are the best performers on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, climbing 58% after tumbling 52% in 2005.


GM, whose Buick division is China's best-selling brand, is the #1 automaker in China, and builds 1.2 million cars there in 2007, up from 877,000 in 2006. GM has seen just over 50% annual growth in its Chinese sales since 2000.

GM China sales in 2009 are expected to climb by more than 40% over the previous year.


At Frankfurt 2007, General Motors annouces that Chevrolet sales across Europe will climb by 30% for the year. GM sold 342,000 Chevrolets in Europe in 2006, for a 1.6% market share. First-half 2007 sales tallied 215,000. European Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri expects much of Chevrolet's future growth to come from Russia.

Meanwhile, South Korean subsidiary GM DAT secures a joint-venture deal to build Chevrolets in Poland with FSO, starting with the Aveo.

FSO is an independent Polish car company taken over and modernized by defunct Daewoo. A subsidiary of Ukranian auto group UkrAvto, FSO builds Daewoo Lanos bodies and ships them to ZAZ for final assembly and sale in Ukraine.

GM DAT owns 40% of the joint-venture company.


By Frankfurt 2007, Russia has become Opel's largest market, overtaking its Germany home in importance. Opel sales in Russia have grown to almost 70,000 anually.


"Flush with excellent new cars; trucks, and crossovers across a wide range of market segments, GM is having a terrible time convincing the American consumer that these products are even worth consideration - let alone getting them to actually buy or lease one," writes Peter DeLorenzo of AutoExtremist.com.

"It's clear that GM is paying dearly for the years when they weren't on the ball and when they took their customers for granted.

"To make matters worse, GM's image has taken relentless broadsides from the anti-car, anti-Detroit factions in the media and in the halls of Congress in Washington for sins real and imagined, which has had a negative cumulative effect on the American consumer's consciousness" (AutoExtremist.com, June 20^th, 2007).

As Interim President of GM Europe, facing a $116 million loss in the first quarter of 2004, Bob Lutz moves to integrate Saab and Opel/ Vauxhall within one central headquarters in his native Switzerland. The two brands share finance; engineering; purchasing; manufacturing; sales/ marketing and aftersales; product planning; quality; human resources; legal, and communications departments.


"GM needs to design vehicles that capitalize on its American roots... vehicles GM can build that no foreign company can do as well," says Erich Merkle, an analyst with Grand Rapids-based automotive consultant IRN Inc. (The Detroit News, May 18^th, 2007). No other automobile so proves this as the 2009 Camaro, first shown as a concept to an awestruck crowd at the 2006 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.


CNNMoney.com staff writer Peter Valdes-Dapena puts it best, observing that "General Motors can indeed have it both ways.

"While Chevrolet goes middle of the road, GM's other divisions can cover the side roads; back alleys, and unpaved trails.

"The idea that General Motors needs to shed divisions like Buick; Hummer, and Saab to compete against Toyota has a certain common-sense appeal. After all, Toyota is continuously gaining U.S. market share with just three brands: Toyota; the Lexus luxury line, and the tiny Scion brand of small, trendy compact cars.

"But by shedding divisions, GM could give up its greatest competitive advantage. Because Toyota must sell a large number of vehicles through just two main channels, it's forced to ply the middle of the road. It would be like GM selling just Chevys and Buicks" ('GM's plan to outmaneuver Toyota,' CNNMoney.com, October 7^th, 2007).

In the Fall of 2006, GM turns down an alliance with Renault-Nissan, a strategy that had been proposed by shareholder Kirk Kerkorian.

Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn had publicly estimated that GM could save at least $10 billion annually by entering into an alliance. Yet further analysis resulted in the disclosure that the $10 billion figure in fact related to the total amount that Renault-Nissan-GM might save on its $125 billion annual purchasing bill. GM in 2005 sold 9.2 million cars and trucks, 50% more than Renault and Nissan combined. "That means GM bought 50% more parts and raw materials than Renault and Nissan combined," writes columnist Tom Walsh for the Detroit Free Press.

"GM presumably exerts more pressure and commands lower prices for its bulk buys, so GM figures it should get a bigger proportional cut of whatever purchasing savings accrue from an alliance" ('Feeble? GM wants its share of big alliance savings,' Tom Walsh, The Detroit Free Press, September 28^th, 2006).

At the 2007 Geneva International Motor Show, GM CEO Rick Wagoner mused that he expected future alliances in the auto industry to be driven by the high cost of replacing the internal combustion energy with alternative power supplies.


In the Spring of 2007, General Motors announced a new turbodiesel engine, designed and produced in conjunction with Italy's VM Motori. The 2,935cc 90-degree 24-valve DOHC V6 motor, features an aluminum head, and bore x stroke of 83 mm x 90.4 mm.

The key innovation here is closed-loop combustion control, which translates direct-injection efficiency to the burning process, ensuring, via embedded sensors, complete burning within each cylinder. The piezo injectors produce pressure of 2,000 bar, and are capable of up to 8 injections per cycle, if necessary.

The additional control of the burning process is good for a 90% reduction of NO_x emissions over the current Euro 4 emissions norms, which means that this engine actually surpasses Euro 5 standards.

GM promises 250 horsepower and 550 Nm of torque (@ 2,000 rpm). The 2008 Cadillac CTS, upon its Fall 2007 debut in Europe, will be the first of GM's models to benefit from the new engine.

General Motors has suggested that the engine will spawn at least one derivative, a 330-horsepower V8 turbodiesel.


GM has been pushing product in a bid to escape the incentive war that it once helped to ignite. Behind the strategy has been the guiding hand of one Robert A. Lutz, Vice Chairman for Product Development, and the only man to have risen to prominence at each of the Big Three automakers. Lutz is frequently praised for his unabashed fervor for all things automotive, and for his knack for astutely allocating money and resources in the product development process.

"If you get a product right, everything else is ancillary," he tells The Detroit Free Press.

"Never mind whether your plants are the most efficient in the world or whether your supply organization gets the stuff for half a percent more or less than Toyota. All of that is swamped by product" ('Critics praise GM's Lutz for results,' The Detroit Free Press, January 7^th, 2006).

Product development lead times being what they are, it takes a few years for GM products guided rom start to finish by Lutz to appear on the market. In the meantime, Lutz's ability to fish across the GM empire for the best of what exists, and to quickly bring it to market while a clean-sheet replacement is in development, is vital to maintaining momentum.


In addition to testing on the N�rburgring Nordschleife, many of today's GM cars prove their mettle on the Lutzring, as the company's Milford Road Course test track is known. The handling loop was built in 2004 at the behest of GM Vice Chairman for Product Development Robert A. Lutz, and boasts some challenging turns including a downhill double-right-hander.

"It's a wonder that a company as large and as powerful as GM hasn't had something like this until now, but it also explains why, until quite recently, so many of GM's cars handled like drunken rhinos," muses MotiveMagazine.com.

Nonetheless, Car and Driver reports, just 16 of GM's 266,000 employees are permitted to drive the Lutzring (Car and Driver, October 2008).


The engineer's dream, writes former general manager of Corporate Strategy and Knowledge Development at General Motors Vincent P. Barabba, is the maximum investment of corporate resources into a single vehicle. By contrast, Barabba ventures that the marketer prefers a strategy of dividing a platform between as many differentiated brands as possible. General Motors, Barabba explains, spent its midsize money in the 1980s on a strategy somewhere between these two poles.

GM's very foundation tends toward the marketer's strategy that there should be a car for every purse and purpose, as founder Alfred P. Sloan so famously put it. The different brands which made up GM would cater to customers with different incomes. For decades, while the bean-counters focused on leveraging economies of scale, the stylists - most significantly, under Harley Earl in the 1950s - hid the commonalities between models while the engineers attempted to get the basics right and tweak them as necessary to justify price differentiation between brands, across the segments in which they played.

Changing market tastes - largely, a combination of two gas crises in a decade and a taste for more inherent (rather than peripheral) luxury - put GM's make-and-sell strategy in trouble. Several models - most notoriously, Cadillac's downsized, J-Body-based Cimarron, effectively a Chevrolet Cavalier with distinct colors; options, and leather - were a stretch too far. The blurring of the distinctions between the brands, combined with obvious jutting mishaps such as Cimarron, highlighted weaknesses even in less obtrusively similar models.

The stage was set for a giant drop in market share in the '80s. Several labels had by now lost their shine, and there was certainly not sufficient glow in, say, the Oldsmobile moniker to overcome the visually obvious: a Cutlass and a Grand Prix were so similar, inside and out, that the sole differences were the interchangeable front fasciae and the price tag.

The relatively low cost structure of manufacturing such cars did not outweigh the inevitable, incentivized drop in the latter. Moreover, rising health care costs were placing pressure on costs.


By the mid-90s, it became evident that, if saving General Motors' brands and its business were truly interchangeable, the brands would have to be targeted in a different fashion than was provided for by the old Sloanist principle. Rather than segmenting the market by income level, the brands would cover different tastes.

It is an idea most associated with the thoughts of one Ron Zarrella, a Bausch & Lomb marketer brought to General Motors in order to modify make-and-sell for a changing market.

Zarrella is near-reviled in enthusiast circles. His lack of understanding of the value that General Motors' brands brought to the table is widely perceived to have done Oldsmobile in, and it may have been a catalyst in bringing Buick and Pontaic to the abyss. To Zarrella, an Impala is an Impala, rather than a part of the Chevrolet family. Per the Zarrella doctrine, cars are products to be sold in much the same way as were consumer goods, without consideration of the history of their brands, or of their impact on a pocketbook as the second major investment most consumers make in their lives.


Yet much though it might pain an aficionado to admit it, there were positives to be found in the Zarrella strategy. For a taste-oriented strategy to succeed, customer tastes would need to be clearly articulated within General Motors. Although consumer research was certainly over-utilized, one must also consider the level of introspection that such a process mandates, in every department. Designers would be encouraged to express their visions in words; engineers were required to understand what inherent advantages consumers might expect from certain brands (the Oldsmobile Intrigue's Shortstar engine, for isntance), and bean-counters were clearer on what could, and could not, be eliminated from a value-added proposition.

Gradually, General Motors' make-and-sell approach evolved into a more developed, proactive sense-and-respond idea.


In 1904, Billy Durant takes over Buick Motor Company, then but a year old. On the basis of Buick, Durant founds General Motors in 1908, acquiring several other companies, and the marketing genius of Alfred Sloan, to help differentiate his diverse line of products.

In the roaring '20s, style and technological improvements are cornerstones of General Motors' strategy for cracking Ford's iron grip on the market. Affrdability is also addressed: the GM line is gradually segmented into price classes while, in 1919, Durant forms GMAC to help buyers finance purchases.

GM surpasses Ford, which closes and retools to match GM's advancements. Just as it begins to catch up with GM, the stock market crashes.