There’s the old Horatio Alger trope about a young man working his way up from the shop floor to become company president. Then there’s the mirror image of this, with the upstart’s path to the top smoothed by a family that controls the company.
Then there’s Mark Reuss and General Motors. Starting as an intern on the factory floor in 1983, Mr. Reuss worked his way up the corporate ladder to become G.M.’s president in 2019.
Because his father, Lloyd Reuss, once held the job he now occupies, Mr. Reuss has heard all kinds of talk of nepotism. But Dad’s tenure near the top, for less than two years, ended with an unceremonious firing in 1992, after he had spent a lifetime at the company. So far, things are not like father, like son at General Motors these days.
In 1980, G.M. had over 62 percent of the U.S. auto market. By 2009, as G.M. emerged from bankruptcy, its share had slid to 19.8 percent. The share today is 17.3 percent. While that’s a far cry from the company’s heyday, it’s growing again. In 2021, just 13.2 percent of car buyers chose General Motors products.
A mechanical engineer by training, Mark Reuss is known as a “car guy,” as his father was. That means, in the parlance of the industry, that he’s a car enthusiast first and then a businessman. His ascension was seen as a rare win for the car guys, and so it has been. He reports to Mary Barra, the chief executive and a G.M. lifer, too. “Really good engineers,” Mr. Reuss said, “and really good finance people, if it’s working right, complement each other.”
Ms. Barra rose to become chief in 2013, the day after the government rid itself of the last of the company’s shares from its Great Recession rescue. Together, Ms. Barra and Mr. Reuss are confronting the industry’s most tendentious issues: electrification and autonomy. Each of these is tied to the American industry’s most worrying threat: brutal Chinese competition.
“Mark is an incredible leader and one of the strongest product minds in the industry,” Ms. Barra said in a statement, “with deep technical expertise and a real passion for designing and building vehicles around what matters most to the people who drive them.”
The division of labor between a car guy and a big-picture boss is bearing fruit, Mr. Reuss said. “This is the first time we’ve had this structure for a long, long time. Which is a really good one,” he said during a recent interview, in G.M.’s Technical Center in Warren, Mich., which was designed by Eero Saarinen. “If you look back at the eras I’ve seen since joining the company in 1986, there was the beginning of problems. Barely a year went by that didn’t have a reorganization in it.”
G.M.’s move into electric vehicles has been hampered by pockets of internal opposition, the wildly differing positions of administrations in Washington and ever-shifting tariffs, but the company remains committed to E.V.s, he said.
“We have not stopped producing any of our electric vehicles,” he said. “We believe in the sustainability piece of this. We really believe in climate change as a problem. I just want to do everything I can for my kids. That’s real, and it doesn’t go away. And I think at the end of the day, these are great cars to drive, really fun and really nice. Once you’ve had the experience of not going to fill your car up with gas, well, it’s great.”
Attesting to this, a towering new 500,000-square-foot battery development plant is rising at its Warren site. Mr. Reuss suggested the company’s assorted battery ventures promise a modern kind of diversification. “It’s not like it’s our core business, but it could be a big piece of it,” he said.
Striving to return to a steady footing in the 1990s, G.M. offloaded many of its in-house parts operations in favor of outsourcing. But, he said, unexpected costs followed: “If you farm it all out, you’re not only paying the margin, but you’re also betting on someone else’s invention.” Still, he doesn’t see the company returning to the comprehensive vertical integration that marked its initial climb to market dominance.
“With about 20,000 suppliers, we run about $88 billion through our supply chain into our plants” every year, Mr. Reuss said. “We are joined at the hip with our suppliers.”
The company’s continued focus on electrification, despite the Trump administration’s lack of enthusiasm, has resulted in quiet, steady growth in an area widely seen by the industry as vital to its future competitiveness in the United States as well as abroad.
In the 2010s G.M. divested its long-held European brands, Opel, Saab and Vauxhall, and then withdrew most of its American-made models from European markets. After several failed attempts to make a sales impression, the company’s Cadillac division has tiptoed back into Europe, relying on its lineup of well-received electric S.U.V.s. The luxury brand’s electric models have notched healthy sales in the United States, with more than 100,000 of its E.V.s already with customers. Cadillac was the best-selling luxury E.V. brand in 2025, with an encouraging 75 percent of its customers coming from other brands. The highest rate of conquest customers? Former Tesla owners.
Mr. Reuss is aware of a line of criticism that faces many contemporary carmakers, the concentration on higher-priced models. He concedes that assumptions made about the market for expensive electric pickup trucks and the GMC Hummer EV (starting at nearly $77,000 and climbing to six figures) were mistaken.
Samuel Abuelsamid, an engineer and industry analyst at Telemetry, a Michigan consultancy, believes that G.M. product planners erred, but they were not alone. “Ford made the same wrongheaded moves when they saw some initial enthusiasm for big, expensive electric pickups, and rapidly cranked up production capacity for the Lightning,” he said. “They saw Tesla claiming two million reservations for the Cybertruck. I think they knew the reality, how these things were going to perform.”
Consumer resistance to the surprisingly poor towing range of both Ford’s and G.M.’s pickups appears to underpin the Ford F-15 Lightning’s plunge in sales and cancellation in favor of a smaller electric pickup, as well as G.M.’s decision to forgo the next generation of its own full-size electric pickups.
In defense of its lineup, Mr. Reuss observed that G.M. sold more than 700,000 cars in the United States last year that cost $30,000 or less. “That’s a big deal, because those cars are really hard to do,” he said. “We were putting those together into a regulatory environment which was punitive.”
One standout in the budget segment has been the company’s gasoline-powered Chevrolet Trax, a South Korean-made small S.U.V. that has garnered plaudits from consumer and enthusiast publications alike.
Another success Mr. Reuss the car guy can claim is the eighth-generation Corvette, which upon its 2019 debut broke tradition by adopting a mid-engine design. While some traditionalists quibbled, it is generally recognized as a notable value in a world where supercars typically cost two and three times as much as Chevy is charging.
The broader industry gives Mr. Reuss credit. “Mark’s one of the all-time-great product guys,” said Eddie Alterman, a top executive at Hearst Autos and former editor in chief of Car and Driver. “Each brand coheres in a way it hadn’t before — all Buicks feel like Buicks, all Cadillacs feel like Cadillacs.”
Though he made it to the top and has succeeded by any reasonable measure, Mr. Reuss is not without a little good-humored snark about the nepotism charge. “I still read it. Like my dad got me my job. ‘Really? Wow.’ I was a summer intern, happened to be at the same company because I love cars. But, yeah, my dad. And he got me this job, and he got me this job, and, by the way, he’s been passed away, and I’ve been here for 40 years, and he’s been promoting me for 40 years, it’s been awesome. How good is that, right?”
The elder Mr. Reuss died in 2023. “I became president before he passed away,” Mr. Reuss said. “I remember I picked him up that night I found out and brought him to my house. So, I had dinner with him and said, ‘I got something to tell you.’ So I told him. And he smiled. And then he cried. That was a great moment.”
