The 10 Best Vehicles General Motors Has Ever Built

The Cadillac Fleetwoods with the V-16 engines launched into the Great Depression in 1930 were never huge sellers, but they set a standard for American luxury rarely met since. Unlike other companies, GM used its own Fisher Body division to provide dozens of potential designs for buyers; the two shown here — a 1934 rumbleseat roadster and a 1937 Phaeton model — were never sold to the public.

No single model has been in continuous production longer than the Chevy Suburban, the original town and country family hauler.

A masterpiece of design and the first home of the Chevy small-block V-8, the 1955-57 Bel Airs have become the quintessential American cars of the 20th century.

At the height of its business, General Motors sold half of all new vehicles in the United States, and employed 600,000 people. It takes that kind of size and swagger to build a car like the 1959 Cadillacs with their 18-foot lengths and fins punctuated by taillamps — a glory of the jet age still turning heads today.

The second generation Corvette as developed by Zora Arkus-Duntov finally fulfilled the promise of America's first true mass-produced sports car — a vehicle that became an icon.

Before John DeLorean rescued Chevy in the 1970s, he helped spawn the muscle car craze with the GTO package for the Pontiac Tempest. In 1966, the Pontiac GTO became its own model, and captured the fast imagination of a generation of buyers.

No list is complete without some debate, and while Olds fans may contend that GM's oldest brand peaked with the original '50s-era Rocket 88, those cars were very much of a similar mold to their GM brothers. The first Olds Toronado — with its front-wheel-drive V-8 and Bill Mitchell styling — was like nothing else before, and not much since.

Chevrolet may have let the Ford Mustang get the jump on the muscle car wars, but the early Camaro Z/28 was a righteous performer on track and street. It also wore a design that has aged into every bit as classic as anything ever crafted by GM.

The signs of greatness in the post-malaise General Motors were few and far between, but the 1987 Buick Grand National GNX has emerged as one of the few truly collectable machines from that era.

To this day, GM has not built a car faster than the 2009 Chevy Corvette ZR1, a 638-hp supercharged monster that used every available tech in the Chevy playbook at the time to embarass supercars costing three times as much.