GM and Ford are talking less and less about EVs
Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all-in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now, the two
Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all-in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now, the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors. TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to analyze the last seven years of GM and Ford quarterly earnings calls and found that both companies are talking about EVs at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic. This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s followed the news over the last two years. Both companies have altered, delayed, or outright abandoned plans for new EV models, prompting layoffs and scaled back factory plans. And while GM and Ford still sell EVs and have new models in their product pipelines, their collective focus has shifted, and it shows in the data. Jim Cain, a spokesperson for GM, said that “quality counts more than quantity.” “We’ve been very clear and consistent in communicating our view that EVs are the end game, the strength of our portfolio today, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, awards we’ve won, our growing EV market share, and our commitment to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to improve profitability,” he said in an emailed statement. But, he added: “we devote time on the calls to discuss growth opportunities like software and services and autonomous technology, and address complex topics of analyst/investor interest like trade and regulatory policy impacts, operating performance, capital allocation, regional performance, headwinds and tailwinds — all while making sure at least half the call is devoted to Q&A.” Ford spokesperson David Tovar, meanwhile, pointed to the company’s planned launch of its new “Universal Electric Vehicle” platform next year.
“[W]e think the first product rolling off the line, a midsize pickup truck, will hit the sweet spot of the EV market for cost, price, and technology,” he said. For this analysis, TechCrunch excluded the ostensible third of the Detroit Big Three, Stellantis, for a few reasons. The automaker, which emerged in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group, traditionally lagged behind its U.S. counterparts in EV adoption. Stellantis also, until the first quarter of this year, held comprehensive earnings calls only twice a year, instead of four times annually, like most public companies. Hudson Labs sourced earnings call transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019, and used its Co-Analyst — an AI research tool purpose-built for high-precision financial research — to assign topic tags to each sentence. It then counted the frequency of those topics as well as each topic’s share of the discussion to produce the charts below General Motors GM bet on mass-market EVs before most other major automakers. It debuted the Bolt EV at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2016, and put the car on sale by the end of that year — a healthy six months or so ahead of Tesla’s first deliveries of the Model 3. EVs really became a focus of GM’s earnings calls as its investment ramped up in 2019 and into 2020. At that point, the company was teasing new made-in-the-U.S. models and talking about transforming Cadillac into an all-electric brand. GM spent an increasing amount of time talking about its EV plans through early 2021, with more than 100 references to electric vehicles on each of its last two earnings calls in 2020.
The BriefWire