Everything General Motors has ever made that isn’t a car

As an Autocar reader, you probably already know this. What you might not know is that the General has also produced an incredible variety of other products, many of them completely unconnected to the motor industry. What follows is a brief run-through of this activity, in alphabetical order of category:

PICTURE: Churchill tank, built by GM’s Vauxhall division in England

The Frigidaire company (originally Guardian Frigerator) was part of GM from 1919 until 1979. We'll be investigating some of its other products later, but for now we're simply noting that it made air conditioners both for cars and for buildings.

Harrison, another GM division which started out building radiators and heat exchangers (including for spacecraft), also moved into the car air conditioning business. Its first unit of this type was fitted to a Pontiac in the 1950s.

As part of GM's contribution to the Second World War effort, the Eastern Aircraft Division was formed to provide extra production of Grumman military aircraft. In another part of the GM empire, Fisher Body designed its own fighter plane called the P-75 Eagle, but the project was cancelled after only a few examples had been built.

GM also had a controlling interest in North American Aviation. North American's planes included the excellent P-51 Mustang fighter, which was designed for use originally by the UK’s Royal Air Force, but later eagerly acquired by the US Army Air Force as well.

PICTURE: Grumman F4

General Motors bought the Allison engine company in 1929. The following year, Allison produced the first of nearly 70,000 examples of the 28-litre V12 engine known as the V-1710.

It was used in aircraft built by Bell, Boeing, Curtiss, Douglas, Lockheed and North American. So many were left over after the War that it became a cheap and popular source of considerable power for dragsters and record cars. Allison later moved into building turbine engines. It was sold to the UK’s Rolls-Royce in 1995.

PICTURE: Allison V-1710 engine

In 1940, GM bought the five-year old Engineering Projects, Inc., of Dayton, Ohio and renamed it the Aeroproducts Division. Aeroproducts specialised in building propellers for piston-engined aeroplanes. They were used in many aircraft, including those built by Grumann and North American.

The last was produced in 1974, by which time Aeroproducts had been absorbed into Allison.

PICTURE: Grumman F8F Bearcat with Aeroproducts propeller

The Yellow Coach company was created by John D. Hertz (1879-1961) in 1923, and was gradually taken over by General Motors as Mr Hertz turned to car rental. The old name was eventually dropped, but GM continued to build coaches under the Chevrolet and GMC brand names for many years afterwards.

It's still possible to build a bus from a new Chevrolet Express Cutaway or GMC Savana Cutaway, but conversions by independent suppliers are not covered by the GM New Vehicle Limited Warranty.

PICTURE: GMC B-Series

During the Second World War, GM’s Oldsmobile division assembled many cannons and large-calibre guns. These were either fitted to Allied vehicles such as B-25 bombers (pictured) and Sherman tanks, or used at ground level to blow enemy aircraft out of the skies.

When it was all over, Oldsmobile returned to its former - and much more peaceful - activity of building cars.

GM's experience in making bearings and balancing moving parts was key to the development of the Centri-Filmer. This device was able to spread a liquid into an extremely thin film, which could then be blasted with ultraviolet radiation to kill any microorganisms contained in it.

This was of great value to pharmaceutical companies, who could use the Centri-Filmer to make vaccines which did not put creepy-crawlies into the bloodstream of their recipients.

In 1985, General Motors acquired Hughes Aircraft and merged it with Delco Electronics to form the GM Hughes Electronics Corporation. Seven years later, Hughes bought the missile business arm of General Dynamics, and therefore became responsible for the Phalanx CIWS close-in naval weapon system, which had been in service since 1980 and remains so today.

The Phalanx is essentially a very fast-firing M61 Vulcan rotary cannon mounted on a swivelling base. It is used on ships to eliminate threats approaching rapidly from the sea or air, including incoming missiles.

Electronic Data Systems was founded by future US Presidential candidate Ross Perot (1930-2019) in 1962, and became a subsidiary of General Motors – then a major client - 22 years later. Already very successful at this point, EDS blossomed still further during the rise of IT, providing services of various kinds around the world, including the results system for the Olympic Games and the management of the UK Internal Revenue's tax and National Insurance.

The latter arrangement collapsed due to major problems with administering tax credits in 2003, but by then GM was out of the game. It had spun off EDS as an independent company in 1996, and was then bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2009.

The electric starter invented by Charles Kettering (1876-1958) of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (later known as Delco) was not the first of its type, but it was the one which popularised the idea.

General Motors acquired Delco in 1918, but the connection went further back than that. The Cadillac Model Thirty was fitted with the Delco starter, which was one of the reasons why it won the Royal Automobile Club's Dewar Trophy in 1912. The combination of easy starting and a long range was what finally made internal combustion-engined cars dominant over their electric and steam rivals.

Like many other companies around the world, GM began to manufacture face masks in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan was said to be capable of making 1.5 million masks per month. It later began producing more complex facepiece respirators too.

Meanwhile, in April 2021 the GM plant in Oshawa, Ontario, fulfilled an order from the Public Health Agency of Canada to supply 10 million masks, having started work the previous May.

PICTURE: GM Canada mask production reaches 10 million

The Dodrill-GMR mechanical heart pump was developed by GM Research Laboratories in conjunction with surgeon Forest Dodrill (1902-1997). The GM team was led by Edward Rippingille (1887-1964), who wrote in an internal publication, "We have pumped oil, gasoline, water and other fluids one way or another in our business. It seems only logical we should try to pump blood."

The machine, which slightly resembled a 12-cylinder engine, was used by Dodrill's team when they were performing heart surgery on Henry Opitek at Harper University in Detroit in 1952. Opitek, who might otherwise have died at the age of 41, lived on for 29 years after the operation.

GM was in the heavy truck business for nearly 30 years. It started out in 1954 by buying Euclid, which had been producing earth movers and similar enormous vehicles since the 1920s. An anti-trust lawsuit forced GM to sell Euclid in 1968 and refrain from selling machinery of this type in the US for four years.

With Euclid now in the hands of the White Motor Corporation, GM created Terex (a combination of the Latin words terra, for earth, and rex, for king), which it kept for a while before selling it to IBH Holdings in 1981.

PICTURE: unique Terex 33-19 'Titan' built in 1973

Before electronic ignitions were invented, most cars used a points-based system developed by Charles Kettering, who we met previously as the inventor of an electric starter.

Kettering developed it in 1908, shortly before founding the company (and later General Motors subsidiary) now known as Delco. Like the starter, it was first used by Cadillac several years before Delco became part of the GM family.

HRL Laboratories is a spin-off of the former Hughes Research Laboratories. The Deep Space 1 spacecraft was powered by xenon-fuelled ion thrusters manufactured to NASA's specifications by HRL. It was launched in October 1998, and passed by the near-Earth asteroid Braille in July 1999.

The thrusters were shut off at the end of the mission in December 2001. Deep Space 1 is still out there somewhere. GM co-owns HRL alongside Boeing.

In 1930, GM bought the successful Electro-Motive company, which had been building locomotives for the past eight years. Under its new ownership, Electro-Motive created many rail vehicles, including the dramatic M-10000 streamliner of 1934.

GM sold the business in 2005. After a further transaction five years later, it is now part of Caterpillar Inc.

Although it started out building first bicycles and then cars, the Winton company had greater success as a manufacturer of large two-stroke diesel engines. It was bought by GM in 1930. Four years later, an eight-cylinder Winton engine producing 660 horsepower was used in the Burlington (later Pioneer) Zephyr streamlined locomotive.

Winton was later reorganised as the Cleveland Diesel Engine Division (not to be confused with Ford's Cleveland engine plant), which we'll come back to shortly.

General Motors was heavily involved with the design and construction of the Lunar Roving Vehicle used in NASA's Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions. According to Ferenc Pavlics (born 1928), who worked at GM's Defense Research Laboratories, the division developed the LRV's chassis, wheels, suspension, steering, electric drive, controls and displays, while Boeing handled the power system, navigation, communication and integration with the lunar landing module.

Pavlics himself came up with the idea of making the LRV foldable, so that it could be stored in a space of approximately 30 cubic feet while being transported to the moon.

Eight GM divisions either assembled or produced parts and raw materials for Browning machine guns after the US entered the Second World War. According to a pamphlet published in November 1944, General Motors had at that time contributed a million of these guns to the war effort.

Over 200,000 more guns were reportedly made from the time that pamphlet appeared until the end of the conflict.

PICTURE: Browning M2 machine gun, a type manufactured by GM during the war. This .50 calibre heavy machine gun is so effective it has been in continuous service with the US Army since 1933

The GM division known first as Winton and later as Cleveland-built several diesel engines for marine use. Among these, the 16-cylinder two-stroke Model 248 - which went into production in 1938, measured 156 litres and had an output of 1500 horsepower - was used in several US Navy submarines and New York City's Fire Fighter fireboat.

The acquisition of the General Dynamics missile business (mentioned previously in the context of the Phalanx CIWS) led to GM manufacturing a wide variety of weapons it had not previously been associated with.

Among the most famous was the jet-powered, long-range Tomahawk cruise missile, which is launched from ships and submarines. The portfolio also included the air-launched AGM-129 ACM and the much smaller, hand-held FIM-92 Stinger. GM sold its missiles businesses to Raytheon in 1997.

Radios manufactured by the General Motors Radio Corporation were offered in Cadillac and LaSalle models in 1930. GMRC was liquidated in the same year, after the US Government filed an anti-trust suit. Radio development was transferred to the Delco Remy division.

At the time, radio units were mounted on the car's firewall and linked by wire to a control unit on the dash. In 1936, GM began producing standalone radios mounted on the instrument panel.

PICTURE: Delco radio offered as an option for the 1956 Chevrolet Corvette

At the start of the 20th century, the only way to keep food cold and fresh was to put it in an ice box. The problem with this was that the ice had to be replaced on a daily basis. Refrigeration units which kept the ice cold were developed, but in 1915 Alfred Mellowes (1879-1960) went a step further by creating a self-contained electric refrigerator in 1915, and setting up the Guardian Fridgerator Company to manufacture it the following year.

Guardian was initially very unsuccessful, but it was saved by GM President William Durant (1861-1947), who bought it in 1919. Now within the GM orbit, the renamed Frigidaire company became a market leader.

PICTURE: Frigidaire refrigerator in 1919

When GM bought Hughes in 1985, the Hughes Space and Communications division already had more than two decades' worth of experience in building satellites. In the year of the acquisition, Hughes launched the fourth of five Leasat satellites from the Discovery space shuttle. It was designed to provide global communications for military forces in general, but was primarily used by the US Navy.

In 1987, Hughes bought the Digital Communications Corporation, a pioneer in Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) ground stations which communicate with satellites, and renamed it Hughes Communications.

Nine years after its acquisition by GM, Hughes started to become a major player in the then rapidly expanding satellite TV market. DirecTV, launched in 1994, required its customers to use a satellite dish with a diameter of only 18 inches. This made it a popular choice at a time when other systems needed to operate with three-foot dishes.

DirecTV quickly became successful, to the point where it was able to buy out rivals PrimeStar in 1999 and United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB) in 2002. It is now 70% owned by AT&T.

As well as the cannons mentioned earlier, Oldsmobile built a phenomenal number of artillery shells during the Second World War. The total, produced at the Janesville, Kansas City and Lansing plants, is believed to be over 45 million, ranging in size from 75mm to 155mm.

In the brief period between GM-owned Hughes buying Magnavox Electronic Systems and selling its aerospace and defence operations to Raytheon, it manufactured a type of device called the sonobuoy.

Sonobuoys detect sounds in water (perhaps echoes of ones they have emitted) and relay them to the ship or aircraft they have been dropped from, or perhaps to a satellite. Among other applications, they can be used to track the movements of enemy submarines.

French cycle racer Albert Champion (1878-1927) formed two spark plug companies after he moved to the US. The first, reasonably enough, was named Champion. After clashing with his colleagues, he founded another one - named after his initials, AC - with the assistance of GM President William Durant.

GM acquired all the stock when Champion died of a heart attack at the age of 49. This company is now part of ACDelco, and remains a rival to the original Champion brand.

GM brands on both sides of the Atlantic built tanks used in the Second World War and later conflicts. Buick, for example, designed and manufactured the M18 Hellcat, which was strictly speaking a tank destroyer, intended to demolish enemy tanks.

The Cadillac Gage division produced tanks for decades under GM ownership before being acquired by Textron. It is now known as Textron Marine & Land Systems. In the UK, Vauxhall suspended all car production at its Luton factory and devoted itself to building several thousand examples of the Churchill tank.

GM's short-lived attempt to become a player in the agricultural machinery market began with its acquisition of the California-based Samson tractor company in 1917. The Model M was a decent rival to Henry Ford’s Fordson tractor, but the walk-behind Model D, known as the Iron Horse, was a disaster.

GM gave up the project in the early 1920s, having reputedly lost $33 million (over half a billion dollars in today's money).

PICTURE: Samson Model D

In August 2020, General Motors fulfilled a US Government contract to scale up production of ventilators in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The V+ Pro ventilators were designed by Ventec Life Systems. GM made 30,000 of them in just 154 days, reportedly an 80-fold increase in the normal production rate.

They were built in Kokomo, Indiana. GM subsequently handed over operation control of the facility to Ventec.

Having started out building devices to keep things cool, Frigidaire began to devote its attention to ensuring other things could be kept clean. At first, the company made top-loading washing machines, which at the time were considered superior to front loaders in the US.

After GM sold Frigidaire to White Consolidated Industries in 1979, the focus switched to front loaders. Frigidaire washing machines and dryers are still made in this format today, now part of Sweden’s Electrolux.

GM has built large commercial trucks and lorries for most of its existence, generally under the Chevrolet and GM brands. Examples include the mighty GMC General of the 1970s and 1980s, which was in the Class 8 group of trucks with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating of over 33,000 pounds.

Bedford started out building Chevrolet trucks in the UK but later came up with its own designs. Its largest vehicle, the TM, was roughly contemporary with the GMC General.

PICTURE: GMC General dump truck

The Detroit Diesel brand was created in 1938, and began manufacturing two-stroke diesel engines for non-automotive applications. The Series 71 was available with anything from one to 16 cylinders, and in sizes ranging from 1.2 to 18.6 litres. It was used in trucks, buses, boats and military vehicles, and often as an auxiliary or stationary engine.

Four-stroke engines would be added to the range later. Detroit Diesel was sold to Daimler in 2000.

PICTURE: Detroit Diesel Series 71

The FP-45 Liberator pistol was unusual among GM's wartime armaments in that it was designed internally, rather than built by the company to existing specifications. Designed by one GM division (Inland) and assembled in great secrecy by another (Guide Lamp) using components provided by several others, it was intended to be dropped into enemy territory and used by resistance forces.

This turned out to be not as good an idea as was first believed. Around a million Liberators were built, but most were scrapped.

GM's Inland Manufacturing Division, mentioned earlier in the context of pistols, was set up in the 1920s to make car components, but switched to producing armaments during the Second World War. From September 1941 to the end of the conflict, it manufactured over 2.5 million carbines (short-barrelled rifles). The M1 accounted for just short of two million of these. Later, GM was the largest producer of the M16 rifle, making around 470,000 for use in the Vietnam War.

The M2 Hyde and M3 sub-machine guns (the latter nicknamed Grease Gun) were unusual among GM's war production in that they were designed internally, rather than built to existing specifications. Both were the work of expatriate German George Hyde (1888-1963), whose extensive career included a spell as chief gun designer at the GM Inland Division. Despite this, production of the M2 Hyde was subcontracted to Marlin Firearms, while the M3 was allocated to Guide Lamp, which built more than 600,000 examples.

PICTURE: M1 carbine

Conglomerates were all the rage until the 1980s. There was a belief that a brilliant management team could turn their hand to anything, and the stock market would allow them to. For a period roughly from the late-1920s, when GM overtook Ford in the US market, to roughly the mid-1960s, GM could legitimately claim to be the most successful company in the world.

Under Alfred P. Sloan (pictured) who ran the company for most of that period the company pioneered concepts like annual model changes, brand architecture and engineering, automotive design, planned obsolescence, and rigorous accounting. These became commonplace across the automotive business and then wider industry. Why wouldn’t a company that had seemingly mastered car-making – it had a 50% market share in the US in the early ‘60s – turn its hand to other businesses?

And for a while it worked, and some of the random parts could help others; as we’ve seen, Frigidaire helped GM become one of the pioneers of in-car air conditioning, for example. But the global automarket became much more competitive from the late ‘60s onwards with the rise of the Japanese and German car makers, and, soon, the buffeting effects of successive oil crises. GM’s cars had a harder time of it, and the company’s other activities came to be seen as a distraction. Hence ultimately most of them were hived off, and today GM makes nearly all is sales from automotive – where it began.

  But this does mean that for a short and curious period in the 90s, GM was involved in Buicks, broadcasting, and cruise missiles – all at a time when Wall Street had long since disavowed the conglomerate business model. After all, investors who wanted a piece of any of these areas of business could direct their dollars directly into companies in these areas, rather than have the General do it for them. And it was also clear that GM was much less good at management than in the past.

PICTURE: General Motors Lansing Grand River Assembly, Michigan