Every Car Brand GM Owns In 2024

General Motors has a history that goes back over 100 years, and that history includes a lot of car brands. Throughout its history, GM has purchased, merged-with, established, and, in many cases, seen the shuttering of over 40 companies including icons like Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Saab. There were even some early unsuccessful attempts to purchase Ford.

Some of these GM ownerships were short-lived, while others are still alive as of this writing. Several of the brands GM currently owns actually pre-date General Motors altogether. With dozens of automotive brands scattered throughout the history of GM, you might think that they currently have a massive portfolio of car brands currently to their name, but that's not the case. The General Motors car brand stable is reasonably sized. Just four brands currently fall under the GM umbrella, with a few partnerships worth mentioning as well. Here are all of the car brands GM owns in 2024, along with honorable mentions of some of the brands that have dotted its long history.

Buick is the longest-running brand that's still in the General Motors lineup. In fact, Buick has been around longer than GM. David Buick made his first automobile in 1899, and after a few successful early years, the company incorporated in 1903. During the early Buick years, the company claimed several performance records, including the fastest five-mile distance for a two-cylinder car achieved in a time of six minutes and 19 seconds. GM founder William Durant wasn't sold on automobiles in the early days, and he's credited with saying that they were too dangerous, frightening horses and people alike. But after some time in a Buick in the early 1900s, Durant changed his mind.

The initial success of the Buick brand led to the foundation of General Motors in 1908, and Buick has been around ever since. Throughout the years, the brand has had some big hits, with critical successes like the Buick Grand National, the GSX, and the Riviera. Currently, their lineup is a bit less sporty and it consists of four crossover SUVs with an alliterative naming convention: the Envision, Enclave, Encore, and Envista. While they aren't quite the top of the luxury heap when it comes to GM products, Buick SUVs do offer a bit of extra style, some upscale trim levels, and an air of sophistication.

Like Buick, the GMC name has been around for quite some time. The brand was founded in the early 1900s and came about after GM purchased the automotive brands Rapid and Reliance. There's some disagreement as to the meaning of the GMC name. Some say it stands for Grabowsky Motor Company, since Max and Morris Grabowsky started the company. But what it actually stands for has its roots in the company name "General Motors Truck Company." The "Truck" part of the name was dropped eventually, leaving us with simply General Motors Company, or GMC. 

GMC was part of a large number of purchases made by GM in the early 1900s. The brand made trucks that were intended for use in commercial and industrial functions. Eventually, they made vehicles like the first mass-produced diesel-powered truck in the late 1930s and military vehicles including the iconic six-wheeled CCKW, or the "Deuce and a Half," and an amphibious vehicle called the DUKW, or the Duck.

In the 1960s and '70s, GMC became a bit more lavish, offering luxurious versions of GM products that were closely related to offerings from Chevrolet. Today, that same relationship carries on with GMC making luxurious versions of several Chevy-based SUVs and pickup trucks. For example, the GMC Sierra 1500 is essentially a Chevy Silverado underneath, with a few additional ritzy bits to class things up. GMC also currently uses the Hummer name (once a GM-owned brand as well) for electric-powered vehicles like the Hummer EV off-roader SUV.

Cadillac is GM's top luxury brand, which typically includes General Motors' biggest, most-expensive concept vehicles — like the new super-luxury $300k Cadillac Celestiq. The name Cadillac comes from the founder of the city of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Antoine founded the city of Detroit in 1701, but it wasn't until 200 years later his name was invoked for the now-famous car brand. 

In 1902, the Henry Ford Company was about to be liquidated. After Henry Ford left the company (to start Ford Motor Company), Henry Leland stepped in to place a value on the assets left at the factory. He concluded that the automobile Ford was preparing to make was viable for production and convinced the investors that the tools and factory should be used to make the new 1903 Cadillac, using an engine from the Olds Motor Vehicle Company.

In the early days of Cadillac, there were extremely strict standards for production, which helped establish Cadillac's luxury reputation. The brand also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts between automobiles and Cadillac was eventually sold to GM in 1909. Over the last 100-plus years, Cadillac has produced some truly iconic designs, including sporty sedans like the CTS-V and ultra-plush, two-door land-yachts like the Coupe de Ville. Its luxury lineup today (which shares a number of platforms with Chevrolet and GMC) includes some EVs, a few high-performance sedans, and one of the largest full-size SUVs you can buy in 2024, the Escalade ESV.

The biggest and most widely-known General Motors brand is Chevrolet. It makes most of GM's mainstream vehicles and its most popular vehicle, the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 off-road pickup. Like Cadillac and Buick, Chevrolet gets its name from a person. Louis Chevrolet, once a racer for the Buick company, won several road races in the U.S. before he turned his gaze to building cars. In 1911, William Durant and Louis Chevrolet co-founded Chevrolet Motor Company, which put out its first cars in 1914. Louis eventually left the company that bore his name, returning to racing and forming the Frontenac Motor Corporation where he built parts for — get this — Ford engines.

In 1918, General Motors acquired the Chevrolet Motor Company and by 1923, had sold 1 million cars. Over the years, Chevy has produced iconic car models including the Impala, Camaro, and Corvette. For a long time, Chevy has offered a wide variety of available cars. That's no different today, with offerings in nearly every vehicle segment that exists. From small SUVs like the Trax and Trailblazer to heavy-duty pickups like the Silverado HD to the supercar-fast, 1,064-horsepower Corvette ZR1, there's quite a few choices when you step into a Chevy dealership. It's no wonder that they've been GM's best-selling brand for years.

Over the years, General Motors has owned dozens of brands. There are too many partnerships and past ownerships to dive into here, but we thought there were some brands worth mentioning, whether because of a historical context or because they exist alongside GM today.

Brands like Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saab, and Saturn are probably some of the first to come to mind when you think about the history of GM and companies that no longer grace their balance sheets, but there are several others that might be less obvious. For instance, GM owned Lotus for a short time — from 1986 to 1993 — but eventually sold the brand to Romano Artioli, who owned Bugatti. GM also purchased the Australian company Holden in 1926, but the brand was eventually shut down in 2020. Opel and Vaxhaull were once GM brands, too, and were sold to the French automaker PSA in 2017. 

SAIC-GM-Wuling (also known as SGMW) is a current joint venture between General Motors and two other brands, SAIC Motor and Liuzhou Wuling Motors. There's some complicated math regarding ownership percentages, but SGMW is essentially a successful GM partner with several small vehicles available in China. Finally, Honda and GM had plans to create cheaper, smaller EVs but called them off. However, the brands did collaborate on several current models that use GM's Ultium platform, with the Prologue and ZDX on the Honda/Acura side and the Blazer EV and Lyriq on the Chevy/Cadillac side.