X-Nico

unusual facts about General Motors Corporation



Atlantic Aircraft

Fokker Aircraft Company of America became a subsidiary of General Motors Corporation which acquired a 40 percent holding in May 1929, but ended operations the following year as a combination of the effect of the Great Depression and bad publicity surrounding the crash of a Fokker F.10 that killed celebrated football coach Knute Rockne (TWA Flight 599).

Capital lending

Capital lending, like its cousin consumer finance, was started by the automobile companies Ford Motor Company and General Motors (GM) in the late 1920s, and has spread to numerous industries around the globe.

Charles I. Krause

One of the first 1,000 men recruited to join the nascent United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1935 by John L. Lewis, then-president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Krause participated in the famed sit-down strike at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan in 1936.

Gama Goat

Several companies bid for the contract, including Clark, General Motors and LeTourneau, but the contract was awarded to Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) aerospace, best known for their A-7 Corsair II aircraft.

Garrett Birkhoff

Birkhoff's research and consulting work (notably for General Motors) developed computational methods besides numerical linear algebra, notably the representation of smooth curves via cubic splines.

GMT900

GMT900 had been called a "Hail Mary pass" for the General Motors Corporation — the company needed the revenue from these large trucks to ensure their financial solvency.

International Suppliers Network

Major companies such as General Motors often use the ISN to establish the "trustworthy" status of a new vendor.

James Ridgeway

Ridgeway became nationally known when he revealed in The New Republic that General Motors had hired private detectives to tail consumer advocate Ralph Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him (Nader was behind litigation which challenged the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair).

Jan Lorenc

The firm identifies its work as "environmental communication design," a body of work that includes museums and visitors centers, trade show exhibits, theme park design, signage, retail spaces, and furniture for organizations including Mayo Clinic, Coca-Cola, North Carolina State University, Georgia-Pacific, Haworth Furniture Company, General Motors, Bank of America, General Mills and Sony-Ericsson.

Larry Shinoda

Shinoda attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles (before it moved to Pasadena) but was kicked out, and went to work first for Ford Motor Company in 1955, then briefly with Packard, then General Motors in late-1956.

Mansukh C. Wani

In 2000, Dr. Wani received an award for applied research in medicine, the Charles F. Kettering Prize, from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.

McClelland Barclay

His fashionable women for General Motors' "Body by Fisher" advertising campaign made his work recognizable to virtually every magazine reader in the United States.

Pontiac Assembly Center

Pontiac Assembly Center, also known as Pontiac East Assembly, was a GMC and Chevrolet (pickup) truck production plant operated by General Motors.

Racing Gears Advance

Racing Gears Advance is a combat racing game for the Game Boy Advance system released in 2004 and includes licensed vehicles from GM, Dodge, Mitsubishi and Lotus Cars.

Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec

Until 2002, when General Motors shut its doors, it was also the home of the only Canadian automobile assembly plant outside of Ontario.

Smear campaign

In order to smear Nader and deflect public attention from his campaign, General Motors engaged private investigators to search for damaging or embarrassing incidents from his past.

Stanton T. Friedman

Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.

Throughput accounting

These relationships between financial ratios as illustrated by Goldratt are very similar to a set of relationships defined by DuPont and General Motors financial executive Donaldson Brown about 1920.

Tom Walkinshaw Racing

TWR also undertook work for other manufacturers including development of the Renault Clio V6, as well as establishing a partnership with General Motors' Australian division Holden, re-creating the former Holden Dealer Team performance and tuning division, Holden Special Vehicles.

Tonawanda Engine

Tonawanda Engine is a 3 facility, 3.1 million square feet; 190 acres General Motors engine factory in Buffalo, New York.


see also

Euclid Trucks

In 1959 the Department of Justice under Attorney General William P. Rogers initiated an anti-trust suit, under the Clayton Act, against General Motors Corporation.

William Durant

William C. Durant (1861–1947), industrialist and founder of General Motors Corporation