Update Oct. 16, 2025 11:45 a.m. ET: We are reminded of another unfulfilled promise Mary Barra made about GM’s electric vehicle future:
General Motors is on track to largely miss its goal of surpassing Tesla in EV market share in the US.
Back in 2021, CEO Mary Barra told CNBC she was “absolutely” convinced that GM would surpass Tesla as EV leader within four years.
By then, Tesla had a 63% market share in the electric segment in the US, while GM represented 10%.
Questioned by reporter Phil LeBeau if the CEO thought they could “catch Tesla by 2025,” Barra said “absolutely.”
In the same interview, the chief executive added that GM would “keep working until we have number one market share in EVs.”
Tesla‘s market share has declined over the past four years, as competition from both legacy automakers entering the segment and new pure EV makers rose.
However, it still remains at least three times larger than the combined market share of all General Motors‘ brands.
Original Post: General Motors Chair/CEO Mary Barra continues to defy orthodox corporate wisdom by surviving in her job for more than a decade. Her failures are many, which include ventures that cost billions of dollars. These include its Cruise robotaxi business, which led to a $605 million impairment charge last year, and more than $5 billion in impairment charges at the end of last year related to its partnership with Chinese state-owned SAIC Motor.
This week GM revealed that Barra has once again been caught driving the company impaired, now that the U.S. government has ceased subsidizing electric vehicles with $7,500 tax credits. The Wall Street Journal reports:
General Motors said it is reducing its electric-vehicle manufacturing capacity and booking a $1.6 billion charge on its EV business as demand sinks.
In a regulatory filing, the company said that EV sales are expected to fall with the end of government-funded subsidies and regulatory mandates that fueled EV growth.
The automaker has dramatically scaled back EV plans after spending billions on the technology. In 2021, GM had said it was committing $35 billion on EVs and autonomous vehicles. Money went toward new models, EV battery development and converting traditional auto factories into EV plants…
EV growth stagnated in the U.S. partly because of high sticker prices but consumers raced to buy the vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 federal tax credit at the end of September. GM recorded a record level of EV sales in the third quarter. Without that incentive, automakers have forecast that EV market will crater in the absence of the credit.
GM said Tuesday that the audit committee on its board of directors approved the charges a week ago “based on a planned strategic realignment of our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint to consumer demand.”
This represents a damning admission by management, that EVs were never economically feasible without significant taxpayer subsidies to boost sales. Barra and her board are not even waiting around to see how big the drop-off is — they know the future for EVs is dire.
The Journal also reported this week that the rest of the world is retreating on EVs:
In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney paused an electric-vehicle sales mandate that was set to take effect next year. In the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer has allowed for a more flexible timetable to hit the country’s EV targets. And the European Union last month bowed to pressure from automakers to rethink—a year earlier than planned—its 2035 target for eliminating carbon-dioxide emissions from cars.
“There’s this realization that, ‘Hey, this transformation isn’t going as fast as we want,’” said Patrick Schaufuss, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey. “EVs aren’t smartphones.”
The reality is hitting hard in the U.S. General Motors said Tuesday that it would take a $1.6 billion charge because of sinking EV sales, a shift it blamed on recent moves by the U.S. government to end EV subsidies and regulatory mandates. The automaker has lobbied heavily this year to loosen EV requirements.
That might just be the beginning of a financial reckoning from automakers that poured billions into new electric models—from sports cars and sedans to big pickups and sport-utility vehicles—to try to get ready for the government-backed EV mandates.
Ford went equally as hard at EV production as GM did, and former CEO Mark Fields said both companies totally blew it when it came to evaluating customer sentiment, as Business Insider reported:
“Over the last couple of years, the automakers really went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs,” Fields, 64, told CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”
“They really didn’t have a good discussion on the consumer, in terms of what it was going to take to get the consumer to buy these EV products,” Fields said…
“This is clearly an issue where the market didn’t develop the way automakers thought. A lot of them, particularly in GM’s case, boasted that they had the full lineup of EVs,” Fields said on Tuesday.
“And what was an advantage, at least they thought at the time, has now probably turned into a bit of an albatross as the market take-up of EVs is going to be lower, at least in the near to medium term, than they plan for,” he continued.
One would think that CEOs like Barra and Ford’s current chief Jim Farley were somehow distracted or otherwise unattentive to totally whiff on gauging customer interest in EVs. One automotive journalist, Phoebe Wall Howard, wonders the same thing — at least in the case of Barra:
Wall Street knows Mary Barra as the CEO of General Motors, a job that earned her a $29.5 million compensation package in 2024 — up 5.9% from a year earlier.
At the same time, she has been juggling her role as a member of The Walt Disney Corp. board of directors, for which she earned $361,657 in cash plus benefits in fiscal year 2024.
While the automotive industry is dealing with one of its most dynamic and challenging periods in history, by every objective measure, Disney has been mired in conflict, most recently pulling late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the airwaves in what appeared to be a response to government pressure.
Shareholders assume Barra is focused on running her company, which had a $55.4 billion market value on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
“Are the shareholders of General Motors happy that she serves on such a large company board that obviously takes a lot of her time?” he said to Shifting Gears. “Disney has been in controversy for years — on its CEO succession, on a lot of different issues. Does someone running a company as big as General Motors, with the issues that they are facing now, does that person have the appropriate time to devote?”
Barra’s Disney distraction is something that NLPC also has wondered about. She is the entertainment giant’s second-longest serving director, since 2017. She appears to only act as one of CEO Bob Iger’s rubber-stamps on the board. Otherwise her contributions for both Disney and GM have largely served to see them flail about with capitulations to woke-ism while delivering repeated financial flops.
As an investor in GM, NLPC has brought a shareholder proposal that sought increased disclosure of risk related to business in China (#WeToldYouSo). We also have called out many times the problematic pursuit of Barra’s full-bore EV strategy (#WeToldYouSo). Another shareholder proposal of ours called attention to the ill-advised incentivizing of GM’s top executives to produce ever greater numbers of EVs (#WeToldYouSo).
Next spring NLPC will present a shareholder proposal at GM that will seek a vote by investors to require Barra to give up at least some of her power, by relinquishing either her CEO or Board Chair role. We will have a lot more to say about it between now and then.
