30+: Every brand ever operated by General Motors

And they may also know that it produces cars under several brand names.

How many brand names, though? Since its creation in 1908 GM has acquired, built up  and sometimes closed over 30, thanks partly to founder William Durant’s early habit of buying almost any company he found producing wheeled vehicles. And sometimes old brands it owns get revived.

Which is what we’ve just seen with Hummer, a name that closed its doors in 2010, but will now be revived as a sub-brand of GMC for a new range electric-powered pickups (pictured). Here, then, is a look at all of them.

Don’t fret if you don’t recognise all the names of this list. A score of ten or above will easily cement your position as a car nut on your local quiz team:

In alphabetical order

Acadians were mildly altered Chevrolets (first the Nova, then the Chevelle) built in Canada and sold there by Pontiac-Buick dealers.

The brand lasted from 1962 to 1971, and gave rise to a short-lived sub-brand called Beaumont. Acadian reappeared as a model name for a version of the Chevrolet Chevette in 1976, but this car was only ever marketed as a Pontiac.

Created in 1992 and disbanded two years later, Asüna was Canada’s equivalent of the Geo brand in the US and a successor to Passport.

The few cars it sold were all built in the Far East, such as the Daewoo LeMans-based GT pictured here.

Along with Wuling, Baojun is a brand owned by a joint venture established by GM and Shanghai-based SAIC Motor.

Created in 2010, Baojun produces a wide variety of models. One of the more recent is the RS-3 pictured above, a compact crossover SUV related to similar GM vehicles such as the Buick Encore, Chevrolet Trax and Vauxhall Mokka.

In the early 1960s, Beaumont was a model name for cars sold by the Acadian brand in Canada. From 1966, it became a brand in its own right, producing slightly altered versions of the Chevrolet Chevelle.

GM changed its policy on this subject soon afterwards, with the result that Beaumonts were sold only until 1969.

Bedford was for many years the commercial vehicle arm of Vauxhall, and took its name from the county town of Bedfordshire - its Luton factory was in the county. What’s less well known is that Bedfords were originally Chevrolets assembled in the UK from parts manufactured in Canada.

Vauxhall took on this work when after it was bought by GM in 1925. The brand was discontinued in 1991, since when the company’s commercial vehicles have been sold simply as Vauxhalls, and the original factory continues today producing vans.

Along with Vauxhall, Buick is one of two GM brands created by Scots. David Dunbar Buick (1854-1929) was born in Arbroath and set up a company in his own name in Detroit in 1899, only to be squeezed out of it seven years later. William Durant (1861-1947) joined the company in 1904 and made it the basis of his new General Motors company four years later.

One of Buick’s main market today is China, where it has been popular and prestigious for a long time. The last emperor of the country, Puyi, its first president, Sun Yat-Sen, and its first premier, Zhou Enlai, all drove Buicks.

Cadillac is GM’s second oldest surviving brand after Buick. It was created in 1902 from what was left of a failed enterprise established by Henry Ford and named after the French explorer Anthoine de la Mothe Cadillac, founder of what is now the city of Detroit.

Cadillac quickly established itself as a builder of high-quality cars, and has been known for years as a luxury brand. It is successful in North America and China, though attempts to break into the European market have not gone well, despite numerous attempts.

Byron Carter founded the Motorcar Company in 1905 and renamed it after himself two years later. The fact that his cars had friction-drive transmission appealed greatly to William Durant, who bought the business for GM in 1909.

Durant lost control of GM shortly afterwards, and by the time he regained it his colleagues had closed down Cartercar. Durant was criticised for the purchase, but said later, “Well, how was anyone to know that Carter wasn’t to be the thing? It had the friction drive and no other car had it. How could I tell what these engineers would say next?”

During his period of exile from GM, William Durant teamed up with Swiss engineer and racing driver Louis Chevrolet (1878-1941) to create the Chevrolet car company. The man it was named after soon left, but the arrangement worked so well for Durant that he was able to regain control of GM.

Chevrolet has since become an extremely popular brand with a global reach and is by far GM’s biggest brand today by unit sales. The name has been used for everything from thundering all-American muscle cars to city cars designed and built in South Korea.

The company founded in 1937 as National Motor was renamed Daewoo after its acquisition by the huge South Korean Daewoo Group conglomerate in 1982.

After the Group ran into financial trouble, the Daewoo car company became a subsidiary of General Motors in 2001. It was renamed GM Korea, and from 2005 the cars were sold in Europe as Chevrolets.

PICTURE: Daewoo Matiz

Named after a town in Ohio, Elmore was created in 1893 and operated as a private concern building two- and four-seat cars until 1908, when it became yet another brand bought by William Durant for General Motors.

The remaining directors during Durant’s enforced absence from GM between 1910 and 1916 decided that this was one of many acquisitions which should never have happened, and that was the end of Elmore.

General Motors of Canada imported several Vauxhall and Bedford models during the 1960s. When sold at Buick or Pontiac dealerships they retained their original brand names, but at Chevrolet and Oldsmobile outlets they were called Envoy.

Envoy models were based on the UK’s Bedford CA van, Vauxhall Victor and Vauxhall Viva. The Viva was officially called the Envoy Epic (pictured) but was commonly known simply as the Epic.

The Envoy brand was discontinued in 1970, but the name was later used for the GMC Envoy SUV, which was produced in two generations from 1998 to 2009.

Geo was the brand name of small, low-priced cars marketed in North America by GM but built and sold elsewhere by Far Eastern manufacturers Isuzu, Suzuki and, in the case of the Geo Prizm pictured above, Toyota.

The Geo name was abandoned in 1997, but cars originally sold with it were marketed as Chevrolets until, in the most extreme case, as late as 2004.

PICTURE: Geo Tracker

Unusually, GM was used as the brand name for the EV1 built between 1996 and 2003, a century after the first electric car boom and a few years before the second. Over a thousand examples of the odd-looking streamlined coupe were built and leased rather than sold. Nearly all of them were subsequently repossessed and destroyed, which led to all sorts of conspiracy theories about why the company would do such a thing.

Then GM CEO Rick Wagoner later said that canning the EV1 project was his biggest regret, as it clearly could have given the company a headstart in the electrification revolution now heading the industry’s way.

GMC began as a combination of the Rapid and Reliance companies, both of which were part of General Motors by 1910. The GMC name was introduced in 1912 and is still used today.

GMC vehicles are predominantly SUVs and commercial vehicles. For around a century they have been closely related to equivalent Chevrolet models, though the GMC brand is considered slightly more up-market.

Established as a saddlery in Adelaide, Australia back in 1856, Holden moved into the car business in the early 20th century. It was bought by General Motors in 1926, and from then on produced cars which, though built locally, were usually heavily influenced by North American and European GM models, though on occasion the traffic went the other way, such as when the Holden Commodore (pictured) was briefly sold as the Pontiac GT in the US in 2008 and 2009.

Australian manufacturing came to and end in October 2017, and in February 2020 it was announced that Holden would soon cease to exist as a brand.

In the 1980s, Indiana-based AM General created the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV, also known as the Humvee, for the US Military. A civilian version known as the Hummer H1 appeared in 1992 and was followed by the H2. GM bought the brand in 1998 and put the much more compact H3 on sale in 2005.

Both the H3 and Hummer itself were discontinued in 2010. In October 2020, it was announced that Hummer would return as a sub-brand of GMC and produce a new pickup with three electric motors producing a total of around 1000bhp. Sales are expected to start in 2022.

PICTURE: Hummer H3T concept (2003)

LaSalle was one of the four companion makes created in the mid 1920s to fill in gaps in GM’s line-up. All would be related to existing brands but positioned slightly differently in the market.

LaSalle’s companion was Cadillac. The cars were almost identical, but the LaSalles were cheaper, though one rung up the ladder from Buick. The brand was discontinued after the 1940 model year, though the name was frequently used on various GM concept cars after the Second World War.

Used very briefly for cars built around 1910, the Marquette name was revived in 1929 to be a companion of Buick.

Production lasted for only a year before the idea was abandoned, but over 40,000 examples (in quite a variety of body styles) are believed to have been built in that short period.

McLaughlin was founded in Canada in 1907, and was incorporated (along with Chevrolet’s Canadian arm) into General Motors Canada 11 years later.

McLaughlin cars continued to be produced, latterly as McLaughlin-Buicks, until 1942. The then Prince of Wales (later, briefly, King Edward VIII) is understood to have been enthusiastic about them, while the present incumbent Prince Charles and his then wife Princess Diana were transported in a 1939 example during a Canadian tour in 1986.

With the sudden death of its founder Edward Murphy in 1909, Oakland was bought by General Motors just two years after it was created. The company was placed above Chevrolet in the GM hierarchy and became very successful.

In 1926 it was given a companion to the more budget-oriented Pontiac. Oakland soon became the only GM brand to be replaced by its companion; Pontiac survived until 2010, while Oakland went defunct in 1931.

Oldsmobile was one of the earliest car manufacturers, having been founded by Ransom E. Olds (1864-1950) in 1897. The Curved Dash model of 1901 is famous for being the first car built on an assembly line (though, unlike the one later used by Ford for the Model T, the line was static, while the workers moved).

Acquired by GM in 1908, Oldsmobile went on to build luxury and high-performance cars for the remainder of the century, with some notable innovations such as the first production car automatic gearbox in 1939 (pictured). It was increasingly lost in the GM brand hierarchy by the ‘90s however, and Oldsmobile was axed in 2004.

Adam Opel created a company in his own name to build first sewing machines and later bicycles. In 1899, four years after his death, the first Opel car went into production. General Motors took a majority shareholding in the German brand in 1929 and bought it outright two years later.

Opel would later become the centrepiece of GM Europe. Versions sold in the UK were called Vauxhall, and similar arrangements applied in Australia, China and North America. For many years unprofitable, GM sold Opel to French conglomerate Groupe PSA (which includes Citroen, DS and Peugeot) in 2017.

PICTURE: Opel Insignia (2008)

Passport was a GM-owned Canadian dealer network which sold cars under its own name from 1988 to 1991. The models all came from European or Asian manufacturers; the Optima pictured here, for example, was really a Daewoo LeMans, which was in turn more or less the same thing as an Opel Kadett or Vauxhall Astra.

Passport was therefore very similar to contemporary GM brand Geo. It was replaced by Asüna, which wasn’t particularly successful either.

As previously mentioned, Pontiac was the only one of the GM corporate makes to outlive its more established companion. While Oakland folded in 1931, Pontiac surged forward, comfortably occupying a position one step above Chevrolet and producing several high-performance models from the 1960s onwards.

GM’s financial troubles in the early 21st century led to a rationalisation which would no doubt have appalled William Durant. One result of this was the abandonment of Pontiac in 2010, 84 years after its creation.

PICTURE: 1979 Pontiac Firebird Formula

The Rainier Motor Car Company was founded by John T. Rainier of New York in 1905 and bought four years later by General Motors, which dropped it in 1911. During its short life, Rainier was known for large, powerful cars offered, as was then the fashion, with several body styles.

One notable owner was Joan Newton Cuneo (pictured). It said a lot for Rainier that Cuneo was willing to buy its cars, since she was one of the finest racing drivers of her day.

Rapid and Reliance were created in Detroit in 1902 and 1904 respectively. Both made commercial vehicles such as Rapid’s curious 12-passenger device pictured here (though Reliance also built cars), and both attracted the attention of William Durant, who brought Reliance into GM in 1908 and added Rapid the year after.

The two brand names were maintained for a while, but in February 1912 they were dropped in favour of GMC.

GM bought a 50% stake in the automotive division of Saab in 1989 and took on full ownership in 2000, only to sell it ten years later. The Swedish company did not survive later attempts to keep it going.

However, GM was for a while very proud of its association with Saab, and particularly with its first model, the outstanding 92 (pictured). In 2008 on its 100th birthday, GM named the 92 one of its top ten cars, even though it was discontinued 32 years before the 50% acquisition took place.

Saturn was an attempt by GM to fight against Far Eastern imports, even though it was actually selling them itself with Asüna, Geo and Passport badges.

The exercise was initially quite successful, and annual sales peaked in 1994, at 286,003 units. Saturn went on the market in 1990, billed as “a new kind of car company”, but sales waned and became a dead kind of car company in 2010, six years after the Ion coupe pictured above was built.

Possibly one of the GM brands you’re least likely to have heard of, Scripps-Booth (with a hyphen) was founded by engineer and artist James Scripps Booth (no hyphen) in 1913.

The company was bought by Chevrolet in 1917 and became a General Motors division the following year. The Scripps-Booth Register reports that the marque was discontinued in April 1922.

Like Buick, Vauxhall was founded by a Scotsman, in this case a marine engineer called Alexander Wilson of whom very little is now known. At the time (the mid 19th century), Vauxhall had a different name and did not build cars, but it joined the automotive business in 1903.

General Motors bought the firm in 1925. By the 1980s, the cars were almost entirely Opels sold with Vauxhall badges only in the UK. The whole company was taken over by France’s Groupe PSA in 2017.

Viking was a companion brand of Oldsmobile, and unique among the four such brands in that it occupied a higher place in the market than the more established company.

Like all the companion makes with the dramatic exception of Pontiac, it didn’t last long. Production began in 1929, and by 1930 GM decided it would be better to persevere with Oldsmobile instead.

Originally named Chelsea after its home city in Michigan but renamed in honour of its founding brothers in 1904, Welch produced high-class and mechanically innovative cars as a private concern until 1910.

In that year the company was bought by GM, no doubt for its technical expertise. The Welch brand name faded from view shortly afterwards.

Wuling is the first brand established by the joint venture between GM and SAIC Motor in the Guangxi region of China. Its specialities include MPVs and commercial vehicles.

Wuling has been in business since 2007. Its sister brand, Baojun, entered the market three years later.

The Yellow Cab Manufacturing Company was set up in 1920 to build taxis for the Yellow Cab Company. Both were owned by John Hertz (1879-1961), who later made a name for himself in the car hire business.

The company was sold to GM in 1925. Hertz became a member of the GM board but retired from the taxi business in early 1929.

John Hertz founded the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company as a subsidiary of Yellow Cab in 1923 and, smart businessman that he was, sold a majority stake to GM in 1925.

Yellow Coach became part of GM’s Truck & Coach Division. The last Yellow design, known retrospectively as Old Look, was officially replaced by the New Look bus in 1959 but did not fully go out of production until ten years later.