Founded in 1908 by William C. Durant and Charles Stewart Mott, General Motors is currently the largest U.S automaker, with hundreds of facilities and 164,000 employees. However, in its heyday, GM was the biggest automaker in the world, with a 50 percent market share in the United States. Now, we’re taking a step back in time with the following General Motors video from 1927, showing the company’s rise around the globe.
The video, produced by General Motors Export Division, looks to promote GM’s worldwide business, highlighting where the company is operating. Clocking in at 10 minutes, 49 seconds, there’s no sound or spoken narration, with the black and white scenes accompanied only by written text.
“Over a million persons get their livelihood from enterprises under [GM’s] sway; its manufacturing plants hum busily in 250 cities; its products bring pleasure and comfort into the lives of untold thousands in all parts of the world,” the video text proclaims.
Throughout the video, we get a look at General Motors’ office buildings in Detroit, as well as its facilities, dealers, and warehouses scattered across the globe.
“It is not America alone that General Motors serves,” the video text states. “Its arteries reach out to every land; its products are known wherever mankind lives and works and moves about from place to place.”
Seeing the extent to which General Motors had expanded by the late ‘20s is pretty cool, as is the old school footage of the GM facilities and locations where GM operated. For those General Motors fans looking to take a quick jaunt back in time, this video is a surefire winner.
“The business of living is very much a business of moving here and there,” the video text reads. “In all cities, in all parts of the world, things move and people go places.”
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Comments
“in its heyday, GM was the biggest automaker in the world, with a 50 percent market share in the United States. Now, we’re taking a step back in time with the following General Motors video from 1927, showing the company’s rise around the globe.”
It sounds like you limit GM’s heyday to 1920s but in reality GM continued to be number one car company in the world and the number one American company by revenue ,period ,up until 2000s. Except a brief period of Exxon reign in 1978 to 1985 GM had been the largest American company by any category since 1929. By 2000 it lost its largest American company title to Walmart and by 2008 largest global automobile manufacturer title to Toyota.
Yes , GM was once the biggest automaker in the world. The Motoramas of the 50’s is great proof of GM engineering. Recent years we have seen GM shrink with Federal government having to step in to keep it functioning. The slide downhill started, when brands started to end Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, Holden, Opel, Vauxhall. Then Buick switch to being a truck brand and be melted into the GMC’s. Then yesterday paper saying we will now see huge discounts on SUV & Crossover over the next year as there is a huge amount of 2019 & 2020’s that have never been sold, still sitting in dealership inventories.
Times have changed. GM is now # 6 behind Toyota, VW, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Stellantis-FCA+PSA and Hyundai. It’s a relatively small company at 77B market cap compared to others like Apple 2.03 T, Toyota 207B, Amazon 1.5T or even Tesla 575B. GM’s main market is now mainly in China and the US.