General Motors Co
What Happened: Barra sees vehicles being either electric or hydrogen fuel cells 25 years down the line. "But it will be emissions free, yes," she said in an interview with David Rubenstein at The Economic Club of Washington DC.
"General Motors have always taken electric vehicles seriously and even had the 'EV1' 20 plus years ago," Barra said, referring to the electric car produced by the company in the late 90s.
Talking about the current EV market where Elon Musk's Tesla is dominating sales, Barra said, "I do have to give Tesla a lot of credit because I think they've stayed committed and they had to work through the years of getting to scale and growing. I think they've really helped the EV Market. I think now there's a lot of OEMs as competition to Tesla so I think it's going to change the dynamics."
Why It Matters: General Motors in the biggest seller of automobiles in the U.S. In the third quarter, the company and its dealers delivered 674,336 vehicles in the U.S. on the back of strong demand for its trucks and SUVs, an increase of 21% year-on-year. However, EVs accounted for only about 20,000 of these sales.
Tesla, meanwhile, sold over 435,000 EVs in the third quarter globally. The company does not provide geography wise segmentation of its deliveries and hence it is difficult to ascertain how many it sold in the states alone.
GM reported revenue of $44.1 billion for the third quarter and net income attributable to stockholders of $3.1 billion. However, during the company's third-quarter earnings call, GM withdrew its EV production targets. This included both the 100,000 EV target the company had set for the second half this year as well as the cumulative 400,000 target the company had set for from 2022 to the first half of 2024. The company did not provide new targets.
