GENERALLY SPEAKING

Jamie Kitman sits down with General Motors president Mark Reuss to talk about the company’s past, present, and future.

- ROY RITCHIE

Mark Reuss, General Motors president since January 2019, has spent every bit of his professional life working for America’s largest carmaker.

Starting while still in college with an internship on the factory floor in 1983, he’s risen steadily since joining the company full time in 1986 as a mechanical engineer. He later earned an MBA in business. Numerous promotions followed, with duties including running the company's Australian Holden subsidiary and overseeing GM's international business, global product development, and purchasing and supply chain, as well as leading program management of all GM vehicles worldwide. He also created and led GM's Performance Division before becoming president of GM North America in 2013. Born and raised in metro Detroit, Reuss is a true car guy, responsible for Cadillac’s V-Series, the resurrection of Chevrolet’s SS models, and, in many tellings, the continued existence and increasing sophistication of the Corvette, in addition to the company’s recent entry into Formula 1.

Famously, Reuss is the son of the late Lloyd Reuss, another long-serving GM loyalist and engineer turned executive, who ran Buick and then was elevated to the role of president, serving a brief stint from 1990 to '92 before being unceremoniously shown the door, this at a time when increased foreign competition and decades of mismanagement at the automotive juggernaut had left GM floundering. With the senior Reuss’s departure went the company’s commitment to electric vehicles, first showcased by the groundbreaking EV1 he'd greenlit, and an increased focus on marketing and cost cutting. Ironically, Mark Reuss’s executive career was often alleged to have benefited from nepotism, an illogical charge that ignored the fact that Lloyd Reuss’s sudden departure from the company came some 27 years before his son would reach the top.