List of GM Engines - Divisions

Divisions

Until the mid 1970s, most General Motors brands designed and manufactured their own engines with few interchangeable parts between brands. In the mid 1960s, there were 8 separate families of GM V8 engines on sale in the USA.

By the 1970s, GM began to see problems with this approach. For instance, four different North American divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick) offered four completely different versions of a 350 cu in V8 engine - very few parts would interchange between the four designs despite their visual similarities, resulting in confusion for owners who (quite naturally) assumed that replacement parts would be usable across the board. In addition to these issues and the obvious overlap in production costs, the cost of certifying so many different engines for tightening worldwide emissions regulations threatened to become very costly.

Thus, by the early 1980s, GM had consolidated its powertrain engineering efforts into a few distinct lines. Generally, North American and European (Opel) engineering units remained separate, with Australia's Holden and other global divisions borrowing designs from one or the other as needed. GM also worked out sharing agreements with other manufacturers like Isuzu and Nissan to fill certain gaps in engineering. Similarly, the company also purchased other automotive firms (like Saab and Daewoo), eventually folding their engine designs into the corporate portfolio as well.

In addition to automobile and truck engines, GM produced industrial engines, which were sold by brands such as Detroit Diesel, Allison, and Electro-Motive. Most of these engine designs were unrelated to GM's automotive engines.