General Motors Chair/CEO Mary Barra is an electrical engineer who also received her MBA degree from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Thus she is smart.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have bad ideas, or listen to poor advice, and/or exercise poor judgment. As NLPC has reported for over 16 years now (which preceded the beginning of Barra’s tenure that started in 2014), GM’s undying pursuit to develop electric vehicles for the mass market has been a fool’s errand. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Barra is getting the message, sort of, but is blaming the auto-buying public rather than GM’s decision-makers:
“We have an opportunity and frankly a responsibility to create a better future,” Barra said in a 2022 speech. She promised to launch 30 electric-vehicle models globally within a few years and, soon after, convert more than half of GM’s North American plants to EV production.
Her ambitious quest to command new markets and save the Earth has since stalled. GM has gone from one of the industry’s loudest EV champions to a leading opponent of government emissions rules and fuel-economy standards that for decades fueled the consumer market for cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles…
While GM says it remains invested in EVs, Barra has stopped referencing her own 2035 target to produce only EVs, saying instead that the transition will take decades. In a July letter to shareholders, she assured them that GM is well positioned to succeed in a market for internal-combustion engines “that now has a longer runway.” Barra is touting GM’s multibillion-dollar investments in V-8 engines, gasoline-powered pickups and SUVs, while nixing plans for factories to make EVs and the batteries to power them…
“What we’re committed to is the customer,” she said about the shift during a Wall Street Journal event in May. “The customer was telling us they weren’t ready.”…
The automaker’s lobbying aims to correct an unrealistic regulatory timeline, given that “the consumer wasn’t ready to go as fast as the rest of us were,” said GM director Jonathan McNeill, a former top executive at Tesla and Lyft.
Catch that? It’s not that Barra’s altruism, ambition and vision were flawed. The problem was that American customers were slow on the uptake. They “weren’t ready.” The brilliant GMsters were too “fast” for the dense average car driver.
As we’ve said here at NLPC for a long time, electric vehicle technology shortcomings related to recharging, vehicle weight, power loss, capacity, safety, and many other factors, are not ready for primetime. They weren’t ready in the 2000s and they aren’t ready now. We even said so with a shareholder proposal last year. The average car buyer knew that already and has for a long time. So how did Barra and her lieutenants elevate to their lofty positions and totally miss it?
Apparent some at GM knew:
In November 2020, Barra pledged to roll out more than 20 new EVs in North America by 2025. To accomplish that, GM would spend $27 billion. Engineers would rely on a one-size-fits all battery system, developed through a tie-up with South Korea’s LG and intended to bring down vehicle prices. Plans included electric versions of its pickups and SUVs.
Not everyone was on board with the speed and scope of Barra’s vision, people familiar with the situation said. Some GM executives, particularly in sales, fretted the company was tilting too far, too fast toward EVs. Barra, frustrated by GM getting cast as an industry laggard, told them to get on board.
Barra set EV model sales targets, saying the company and its engineers would be more successful if they were under the gun, the people familiar said. We don’t want to be disrupted, we need to disrupt ourselves, Barra has said inside and outside the company.
In January 2021, Barra showcased the company’s EV business at CES, the tech industry’s pre-eminent annual show. She pledged to spend billions, aided by government funds, to convert factories making gas-powered engines and vehicles to churn out EVs and batteries.
So Barra’s stance was to ignore her own ne’er-do-wells responsible for knowing what cars the public will actually buy. It’s as if she decided: “If I just pressure them and our engineers to produce, with both carrots and sticks, my vision will be fulfilled!”
Mary Barra has clearly demonstrated she lacks business sense and has poor instincts when it comes to the auto industry. She follows fads and gimmicks, is entranced with tech imaginations without proof of concept, and thinks if you build it, they will come. If they don’t, then it’s just that she’s too smart and too fast for the public.
The car business isn’t a movie — transportation is an essential and important factor in the economic vitality for every single American. GM needs a change in leadership, not simply because of a brand decision, but because of the current CEO’s way of thinking. It doesn’t work.
