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General Motors builds and sells cars and trucks, and it also makes money from financing car loans and developing self-driving technology.
General Motors is one of the world's biggest carmakers. It sells Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, and Buick vehicles, mostly in North America, and it makes money two main ways: selling the trucks and cars themselves, and lending people the money to buy them through its finance arm. Its most important products are full-size pickup trucks and large SUVs like the Chevy Silverado and GMC Yukon, because Americans pay a lot for them and the profit per vehicle is fat. GM also owns OnStar, the in-car safety and subscription service.
The tricky part of the car business is that it is brutally capital-hungry and cyclical. You spend billions building factories and designing new models years before a single sale, then hope buyers show up. GM has spent the last decade restructuring, pulling back from money-losing markets like Europe and focusing on the places where it actually earns good money. It has also been pouring money into electric vehicles, launching a whole family of them on its Ultium battery platform, though the ramp-up has been slower and costlier than planned. GM's self-driving unit, Cruise, is the moonshot. It was supposed to be a robotaxi business that would eventually dwarf car sales, but after a serious accident in San Francisco in 2023, the company pulled back hard, cut spending, and folded Cruise into its broader operations. That is a useful window into how these big bets work: the upside is enormous, but the timeline keeps slipping and the bills keep coming. The company generates a lot of cash and sends much of it back to shareholders through dividends and buybacks—it has retired roughly a third of its shares over the past decade, a big deal for a company whose stock has often traded cheaply. Its main rivals are Ford, Stellantis, and Toyota, plus Tesla and the Chinese carmakers looming on the horizon. The bull case is that GM makes solid money on gas trucks, pays you to wait, and is quietly building an electric future. The bear case is that the car business is a treadmill of huge fixed costs, and the future keeps arriving later than promised.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026
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