April 14, 2025 • 15 mins
It’s been a tough year for electric vehicles: Since President Trump took office for a second term, the US has started a complete 180 on its investment in EVs. And as Trump’s trade war continues, the industry is bracing for additional tariffs and disruption to supply chains.
But one company is pushing forward: General Motors. On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg Detroit Bureau Chief David Welch and host David Gura examine the road ahead for GM’s big bet on electric, and what it means for future EV buyers.
Read more: GM’s Mary Barra Has to Make a $35 Billion EV Bet Work in Trump’s America
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. President Trump's tariff announcements
are still reverberating throughout the world, and new twists keep coming.
On Friday, Trump announced there would be a temporary exception
from tariffs for phones, computers, and popular consumer electronics, and
(00:22):
today he indicated relief could be ahead for another sector,
the auto industry. Trump told reporters he was exploring possible
temporary exemptions to tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.
While things could still change on a dime, the auto
exemptions could be welcome news for one industry at a
critical juncture, the electric vehicle industry. Since Trump took office
(00:47):
for a second term in January, the US has started
to do a complete one eighty on its investment in evs.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
The tariffs are making vehicles more expensive, and all of
this is creating economic concerts to you and dropping consumer confidence.
So you're talking about something that's by a lot of
people still seen as kind of a luxury good, an
electric vehicle.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
David Welch is Bloomberg's bureau chief in Detroit, where he
covers the car industry. Lately, he's been looking into the
switch away from electric vehicles by the federal government and
by some of the biggest automakers, But David says one
company has mostly held firm on its commitment to evs
as others have ditched them, and that's General Motors.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We have a very strong ED portfolio. We have the
broadest in the key segments.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
That's GM CEO Mary Barra, who David spoke to earlier
this month. GM developed what was essentially the world's first
modern all electric car on the market in the nineteen nineties,
and as its competitors steer away from them, GM is
betting on their.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Future over the long term. We think EED demand will
grow from mid to long term. A lot of it
is the consumer is very irrational, and it has to
do with what's the cost to the vehicle, what's the
range of the vehicle, what's the charging infrastructure. Those things
are going to continue to improve.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But there are huge hurdles ahead from a shaky market
for the cars to uncertainty in Washington.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So whoever's still in the game and a lot of
companies and backed away. What whoever's still in the game.
There are a lot of challenges that are either existent
right now in terms of how consumers view electric vehicles
or some potential big clouds here on the horizon.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News today. On the show GM's Big bet on
electric Vehicles? Can the company weather the EV downturn and
come out on top? And what do its ambitions mean
for electric vehicle owners and for the consumers who want them? Well?
(02:58):
Spoke with my co host David gar here's that conversation.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Just how hard is it to be in the electric
vehicle business right now?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It's kind of always been hard, but it's even tougher
these days. Because you had this massive growth period that
really started probably twenty eighteen when Tesla was starting to
put out a lot of models, and that lasted until
about twenty twenty two, and then there was still growth,
but things started kind of ratcheting down in terms of
the growth rates. The early adopters had their cars, the
(03:26):
luxury buyers who wanted an EV, they wanted the latest thing,
They got their cars, and you start to get among
the mass market and people worry about how far the
car can go before it has to be charged. They're
more expensive, and so growth slowed, and now you do
have President Biden's EV tax credits are still out there
and still getting people to buy evs, but Trump is
(03:48):
threatening them.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Over the last year year and a half, what does
this market look like? Has it been performing?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
We had the past year, so it's a twenty twenty four.
There was growth. I think the total EV market was
up seven percent, which is more growth than the regular
vehicle market head But the year before that it was
a fifty percent growth. So you can see that we're
kind of hitting a critical mass where evs are roughly,
let's call it, eight to ten percent of the US
market at any given quarter, and that's kind of where
(04:14):
it's settling in right now. And I think it's going
to grow from here, but I think the growth is
going to be harder fought.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
You mentioned that there are some companies that might still
be in the game, but perhaps have reduced their dependency
on electric vehicles, changed their timeline from when they planned
to transition to electric vehicles. Why hasn't GM made that decision?
Why is GM still, for all matter of things, still
all in on electric vehicles.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, Look, it's sort of the industry is divided into
two groups. You've got companies like Ford, Honda, Toyota that
have kind of pulled back to laid investment, canceled certain investments.
And then you've got GM, Hyundai and of course Tesla
because that's all they do, that are still pushing ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
For GM, they see this one as a growth area, right.
The other part is long term, they see, we're ardles
of what the Trump administration does, future administrations and governments
in China, in Europe, in the US, other markets, pushing
for cleaner transportation. And I think they also believe that
very long term, one day all vehicles will be electric.
So you may as well learn this, get platforms that
(05:16):
can give you scale, get knowledge of battery, get your
cost down, do it now rather than wait, and you know,
all these things sort of make sense in the long term.
Near term though, it's set them up for a struggle
and they're probably going to lose money on these vehicles
for a while.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
David, what kind of investment has GM made in inevs.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
They have invested about thirty five billion dollars. That's for
the technology, the vehicles they've developed, the battery plants, the
assembly plants that they've retooled to do this, and that
includes vehicles that they sell in China as well, but
it's a very big investment they got out there.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
With electric vehicles, the battery is everything. How is GM
approaching battery design, battery manufacturing.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
What they're trying to do to get battery costs down,
which is vital because you take the battery for like
a Chevy Equinox, for example, the pack alone is roughly
thirteen thousand dollars, So to get that cost down, they're
looking at a battery pack that's more similar to what
BYD does.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
That's BYD Auto, a Chinese carmaker.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
What BYD in China does is that their cells are
kind of shaped like a small brick, and the advantage
there is you don't have space between them. So if
you can get a smaller battery pack, even if it's
a little more expensive to make it, maybe you can
have fewer cells, get more power on board, and it's
just a more efficient package. That's one of the big
things they're trying to do. And the other thing is
(06:39):
that they're going for some cheaper chemistries that don't let
you drive as long, but it does make for a
cheaper ev So those are the two big levers they're
trying to pull David.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
I know this is a big priority for Mary Borrow,
who's the CEO of GM, and she spent her whole
career at the company. Why did she decide to make
this something that she wanted to prioritize.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, GM, under Mary Barrow I had a plan that
goes back probably six or seven years where she had
this vision with autonomous cars and electric cars to you know,
she called it zero zero, zero, zero missions, zero congestion,
and zero crashes. I think it was so the autonomous
vehicles would help with congestion and crashes, and of course
(07:19):
the electric vehicles would help with the emissions. Now, that
was more of a mission statement sort of thing than
something that I think they thought was a near term reality.
But she wanted to take GM, which was this one
hundred year old company that sells pickup trucks and big SUVs,
and modernize it. So that was self driving technology, it
was software based vehicles, and it was electric cars. And
(07:42):
you know, to her credit, I think Mary Borrow learned
a lesson from the EV one.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
The EV one that's the electric car that GM started
selling back in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Here they released out a few thousand of them. The
customers that had them loved them, but they lost a
lot of money on the program, so they shut it
down in two thousand and three, that's the same year
Tesla was founded. And Tesla's stuck with its EV development
over those two decades, through good times and bad. You know,
now Tesla is the one with a huge market cap,
even though that's obviously suffered the past year. But you know,
(08:21):
Tesla's the one that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars
and GM's worth about fifty billion dollars. They missed out
on an opportunity when they were the first one in
the game. And I think she's saying, all right, we
have to stick through this because it will be the
future one day, even if the future is not going
to get here as fast as we thought.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
For now, though, David Welch says GM is losing money
on its current EV push, So will that bet on
the future pay off? After the break, how Trump's tariffs
have upended GM's electric vehicle plans and how long the
company might have before it runs out of road? David,
(09:02):
how has President Trump's reelection changed the landscape for GM?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Look, it's kind of changed everything. First off, GM's two
most affordable evs, which are the Chevy Equinox and Chevy Blazer.
They're made in Mexico, so they're facing a tariff right now.
With the exception of the US made content on those vehicles,
the rest of the vehicle will face a twenty five
percent tariff. There are other parts and things on the
US assembled evs that are going to be tariffed as well.
(09:28):
And then the other big thing, of course, is Trump
is vowed to get rid of the electric vehicle tax credits.
That's seventy five hundred dollars to the consumer who buys one,
and there are thousands of dollars that go to the
manufacture of these evs as well, which essentially means all
the companies who sell evs have to figure out do
they discount their evs by seventy five hundred bucks or
(09:49):
five thousand or whatever the number is to keep volume
going and then just eat that in terms of profitability,
or do they leave the price where it is and
hope they sell Without the tax credits. It just makes
life that much more difficult when you're trying to sell vehicles,
and this money that was going to come from the
government may not be there. In say, six months, or
whenever Trump gets around dealing with that issue. He's a
little busy with tariffs right now, but I think eventually
(10:11):
he's going to turn his head to the EB tax credits,
and they're certainly on the chopping block.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
David, you talked with Mary Barrow, and I wonder what
you learned about the relationship that she's managed to develop
with President Trump.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
So some of the tension between Mary Barrow and President
Trump started in his first term. He'd called the CEOs
of the Detroit three companies to Washington and said, look,
I'm going to cut the few economy and emissions rules
that the Democrats have put in place, and you can
sell all the pickup trucks and big SUVs you want,
make lots of money. In return, you're going to hire
(10:45):
more Americans and get those factories humming, and we're going
to bring back US automaking again. And Mary Barr was
already on this path of leaning up the company, improving
its profits and cash flow, and that meant closing some plans,
including a big one in Lordstown, Ohio that infuriated Trump.
And what she was doing by saving money in boosting
(11:05):
cash flow was investing in self driving cars and electric vehicles.
Trump didn't care about either one of those things. He
just wants jobs, and so she takes away jobs, and
in its place, she invested something he doesn't care about.
And there was just a lot of tension over that
during his first term. So that was the cause of
conflict the first time around. And now, look, every car
(11:26):
company is struggling with these tariffs, particularly if they stay
in place for a long time. But GM imports one
point two million vehicles into the US market out of
the two point seven million that they sell, and a
lot of them come from Mexico. Trump does more love that.
He wants GM to hire more people here. I don't
think Mary Barr is in a war with him over that.
But GM is certainly, like other car companies, lobbying hard
(11:47):
to make sure these tariffs don't last long so they
can kind of continue the businesses of bringing in parts
from all over the world, bringing in cars from Canada
or Mexico for the US market. Trump wants things made
the United States, and so there's going to be some
natural tension there.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
When she looks at the competitive landscape, who does she
see as her biggest rival? How does she see that
competitive space.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
I think BYD because GM does still even though it's declined,
they have a significant business in China, and by D
is the big player in the China EV business. But
in the US, Tundai and Tesla and like Tesla look,
they're still by far the leader in US EV sales.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
We have watched consumer sentiment to a degree change when
it comes to Tesla. People who are upset that they
bought Tesla's or won't entertain buying them because of Elon
Musk's proximity to the president. Is that an opportunity for
GM or they trying to pick off some of those
customers or prospective customers.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
They are now GM isn't being overt about it, like
you're not seeing ads, you know, dealing with Elon Musk's
politics and seeing come by from US and look in
a lot of products. The people who buy products don't
necessarily know or care about the politics of the CEO
of that company. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk so identifiable
for being allied with the Trump administration that I think
(13:04):
it has become a factor. It's not the only factor.
The other thing is GM has fresher vehicles than Tesla,
does the model why is being refreshed right now, But
the others have been kind of the same looking for
a long time, so they have some stale product. So
you know, in addition to this political issue, I think
we just have stale Teslo product, and GM and for
that matter, Hyundai have a real chance to go in
(13:25):
and get some buyers.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Just wrapping up here, David, GM has been in this
game for a while now. By what is this company
going to know if it's bet on EVS has paid off?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I would say probably the next two years. We'll see
if they get this critical mass of sales. Their sales
doubled almost in the first quarter of this year. So
if we look out a couple of years and they've
sold three four hundred thousand or half a million evs,
and you know, they've gained more market share doing this,
and the program starts to break even, I think they
(13:56):
can say that it's a pretty good success and they
can really build on that. Not then they've got a
lot of stranded capital and a lot of factories that
aren't producing much, and they'll probably end up having a
way off workers who work in those plans.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
David, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Good problem Thanks Chris.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura.
This episode is produced by Alex tie. It was edited
by Aaron Edwards and Mark Millian, who was fact checked
by Adriana Tapia, and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sagura.
Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is
Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver. Our
executive producer is Nicole Beemster. Board Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's
(14:39):
head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show and if
you want to learn more, David Welch wrote a book
called Charging Ahead, GM Mary Bara and the Reinvention of
an American Icon. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. President Trump's tariff announcements
are still reverberating throughout the world, and new twists keep coming.
On Friday, Trump announced there would be a temporary exception
from tariffs for phones, computers, and popular consumer electronics, and
(00:22):
today he indicated relief could be ahead for another sector,
the auto industry. Trump told reporters he was exploring possible
temporary exemptions to tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.
While things could still change on a dime, the auto
exemptions could be welcome news for one industry at a
critical juncture, the electric vehicle industry. Since Trump took office
(00:47):
for a second term in January, the US has started
to do a complete one eighty on its investment in evs.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
The tariffs are making vehicles more expensive, and all of
this is creating economic concerts to you and dropping consumer confidence.
So you're talking about something that's by a lot of
people still seen as kind of a luxury good, an
electric vehicle.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
David Welch is Bloomberg's bureau chief in Detroit, where he
covers the car industry. Lately, he's been looking into the
switch away from electric vehicles by the federal government and
by some of the biggest automakers, But David says one
company has mostly held firm on its commitment to evs
as others have ditched them, and that's General Motors.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We have a very strong ED portfolio. We have the
broadest in the key segments.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
That's GM CEO Mary Barra, who David spoke to earlier
this month. GM developed what was essentially the world's first
modern all electric car on the market in the nineteen nineties,
and as its competitors steer away from them, GM is
betting on their.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Future over the long term. We think EED demand will
grow from mid to long term. A lot of it
is the consumer is very irrational, and it has to
do with what's the cost to the vehicle, what's the
range of the vehicle, what's the charging infrastructure. Those things
are going to continue to improve.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But there are huge hurdles ahead from a shaky market
for the cars to uncertainty in Washington.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So whoever's still in the game and a lot of
companies and backed away. What whoever's still in the game.
There are a lot of challenges that are either existent
right now in terms of how consumers view electric vehicles
or some potential big clouds here on the horizon.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News today. On the show GM's Big bet on
electric Vehicles? Can the company weather the EV downturn and
come out on top? And what do its ambitions mean
for electric vehicle owners and for the consumers who want them? Well?
(02:58):
Spoke with my co host David gar here's that conversation.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Just how hard is it to be in the electric
vehicle business right now?
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It's kind of always been hard, but it's even tougher
these days. Because you had this massive growth period that
really started probably twenty eighteen when Tesla was starting to
put out a lot of models, and that lasted until
about twenty twenty two, and then there was still growth,
but things started kind of ratcheting down in terms of
the growth rates. The early adopters had their cars, the
(03:26):
luxury buyers who wanted an EV, they wanted the latest thing,
They got their cars, and you start to get among
the mass market and people worry about how far the
car can go before it has to be charged. They're
more expensive, and so growth slowed, and now you do
have President Biden's EV tax credits are still out there
and still getting people to buy evs, but Trump is
(03:48):
threatening them.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Over the last year year and a half, what does
this market look like? Has it been performing?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
We had the past year, so it's a twenty twenty four.
There was growth. I think the total EV market was
up seven percent, which is more growth than the regular
vehicle market head But the year before that it was
a fifty percent growth. So you can see that we're
kind of hitting a critical mass where evs are roughly,
let's call it, eight to ten percent of the US
market at any given quarter, and that's kind of where
(04:14):
it's settling in right now. And I think it's going
to grow from here, but I think the growth is
going to be harder fought.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
You mentioned that there are some companies that might still
be in the game, but perhaps have reduced their dependency
on electric vehicles, changed their timeline from when they planned
to transition to electric vehicles. Why hasn't GM made that decision?
Why is GM still, for all matter of things, still
all in on electric vehicles.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, Look, it's sort of the industry is divided into
two groups. You've got companies like Ford, Honda, Toyota that
have kind of pulled back to laid investment, canceled certain investments.
And then you've got GM, Hyundai and of course Tesla
because that's all they do, that are still pushing ahead.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
For GM, they see this one as a growth area, right.
The other part is long term, they see, we're ardles
of what the Trump administration does, future administrations and governments
in China, in Europe, in the US, other markets, pushing
for cleaner transportation. And I think they also believe that
very long term, one day all vehicles will be electric.
So you may as well learn this, get platforms that
(05:16):
can give you scale, get knowledge of battery, get your
cost down, do it now rather than wait, and you know,
all these things sort of make sense in the long term.
Near term though, it's set them up for a struggle
and they're probably going to lose money on these vehicles
for a while.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
David, what kind of investment has GM made in inevs.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
They have invested about thirty five billion dollars. That's for
the technology, the vehicles they've developed, the battery plants, the
assembly plants that they've retooled to do this, and that
includes vehicles that they sell in China as well, but
it's a very big investment they got out there.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
With electric vehicles, the battery is everything. How is GM
approaching battery design, battery manufacturing.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
What they're trying to do to get battery costs down,
which is vital because you take the battery for like
a Chevy Equinox, for example, the pack alone is roughly
thirteen thousand dollars, So to get that cost down, they're
looking at a battery pack that's more similar to what
BYD does.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
That's BYD Auto, a Chinese carmaker.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
What BYD in China does is that their cells are
kind of shaped like a small brick, and the advantage
there is you don't have space between them. So if
you can get a smaller battery pack, even if it's
a little more expensive to make it, maybe you can
have fewer cells, get more power on board, and it's
just a more efficient package. That's one of the big
things they're trying to do. And the other thing is
(06:39):
that they're going for some cheaper chemistries that don't let
you drive as long, but it does make for a
cheaper ev So those are the two big levers they're
trying to pull David.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
I know this is a big priority for Mary Borrow,
who's the CEO of GM, and she spent her whole
career at the company. Why did she decide to make
this something that she wanted to prioritize.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, GM, under Mary Barrow I had a plan that
goes back probably six or seven years where she had
this vision with autonomous cars and electric cars to you know,
she called it zero zero, zero, zero missions, zero congestion,
and zero crashes. I think it was so the autonomous
vehicles would help with congestion and crashes, and of course
(07:19):
the electric vehicles would help with the emissions. Now, that
was more of a mission statement sort of thing than
something that I think they thought was a near term reality.
But she wanted to take GM, which was this one
hundred year old company that sells pickup trucks and big SUVs,
and modernize it. So that was self driving technology, it
was software based vehicles, and it was electric cars. And
(07:42):
you know, to her credit, I think Mary Borrow learned
a lesson from the EV one.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
The EV one that's the electric car that GM started
selling back in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Here they released out a few thousand of them. The
customers that had them loved them, but they lost a
lot of money on the program, so they shut it
down in two thousand and three, that's the same year
Tesla was founded. And Tesla's stuck with its EV development
over those two decades, through good times and bad. You know,
now Tesla is the one with a huge market cap,
even though that's obviously suffered the past year. But you know,
(08:21):
Tesla's the one that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars
and GM's worth about fifty billion dollars. They missed out
on an opportunity when they were the first one in
the game. And I think she's saying, all right, we
have to stick through this because it will be the
future one day, even if the future is not going
to get here as fast as we thought.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
For now, though, David Welch says GM is losing money
on its current EV push, So will that bet on
the future pay off? After the break, how Trump's tariffs
have upended GM's electric vehicle plans and how long the
company might have before it runs out of road? David,
(09:02):
how has President Trump's reelection changed the landscape for GM?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Look, it's kind of changed everything. First off, GM's two
most affordable evs, which are the Chevy Equinox and Chevy Blazer.
They're made in Mexico, so they're facing a tariff right now.
With the exception of the US made content on those vehicles,
the rest of the vehicle will face a twenty five
percent tariff. There are other parts and things on the
US assembled evs that are going to be tariffed as well.
(09:28):
And then the other big thing, of course, is Trump
is vowed to get rid of the electric vehicle tax credits.
That's seventy five hundred dollars to the consumer who buys one,
and there are thousands of dollars that go to the
manufacture of these evs as well, which essentially means all
the companies who sell evs have to figure out do
they discount their evs by seventy five hundred bucks or
(09:49):
five thousand or whatever the number is to keep volume
going and then just eat that in terms of profitability,
or do they leave the price where it is and
hope they sell Without the tax credits. It just makes
life that much more difficult when you're trying to sell vehicles,
and this money that was going to come from the
government may not be there. In say, six months, or
whenever Trump gets around dealing with that issue. He's a
little busy with tariffs right now, but I think eventually
(10:11):
he's going to turn his head to the EB tax credits,
and they're certainly on the chopping block.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
David, you talked with Mary Barrow, and I wonder what
you learned about the relationship that she's managed to develop
with President Trump.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
So some of the tension between Mary Barrow and President
Trump started in his first term. He'd called the CEOs
of the Detroit three companies to Washington and said, look,
I'm going to cut the few economy and emissions rules
that the Democrats have put in place, and you can
sell all the pickup trucks and big SUVs you want,
make lots of money. In return, you're going to hire
(10:45):
more Americans and get those factories humming, and we're going
to bring back US automaking again. And Mary Barr was
already on this path of leaning up the company, improving
its profits and cash flow, and that meant closing some plans,
including a big one in Lordstown, Ohio that infuriated Trump.
And what she was doing by saving money in boosting
(11:05):
cash flow was investing in self driving cars and electric vehicles.
Trump didn't care about either one of those things. He
just wants jobs, and so she takes away jobs, and
in its place, she invested something he doesn't care about.
And there was just a lot of tension over that
during his first term. So that was the cause of
conflict the first time around. And now, look, every car
(11:26):
company is struggling with these tariffs, particularly if they stay
in place for a long time. But GM imports one
point two million vehicles into the US market out of
the two point seven million that they sell, and a
lot of them come from Mexico. Trump does more love that.
He wants GM to hire more people here. I don't
think Mary Barr is in a war with him over that.
But GM is certainly, like other car companies, lobbying hard
(11:47):
to make sure these tariffs don't last long so they
can kind of continue the businesses of bringing in parts
from all over the world, bringing in cars from Canada
or Mexico for the US market. Trump wants things made
the United States, and so there's going to be some
natural tension there.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
When she looks at the competitive landscape, who does she
see as her biggest rival? How does she see that
competitive space.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
I think BYD because GM does still even though it's declined,
they have a significant business in China, and by D
is the big player in the China EV business. But
in the US, Tundai and Tesla and like Tesla look,
they're still by far the leader in US EV sales.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
We have watched consumer sentiment to a degree change when
it comes to Tesla. People who are upset that they
bought Tesla's or won't entertain buying them because of Elon
Musk's proximity to the president. Is that an opportunity for
GM or they trying to pick off some of those
customers or prospective customers.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
They are now GM isn't being overt about it, like
you're not seeing ads, you know, dealing with Elon Musk's
politics and seeing come by from US and look in
a lot of products. The people who buy products don't
necessarily know or care about the politics of the CEO
of that company. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk so identifiable
for being allied with the Trump administration that I think
(13:04):
it has become a factor. It's not the only factor.
The other thing is GM has fresher vehicles than Tesla,
does the model why is being refreshed right now, But
the others have been kind of the same looking for
a long time, so they have some stale product. So
you know, in addition to this political issue, I think
we just have stale Teslo product, and GM and for
that matter, Hyundai have a real chance to go in
(13:25):
and get some buyers.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Just wrapping up here, David, GM has been in this
game for a while now. By what is this company
going to know if it's bet on EVS has paid off?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I would say probably the next two years. We'll see
if they get this critical mass of sales. Their sales
doubled almost in the first quarter of this year. So
if we look out a couple of years and they've
sold three four hundred thousand or half a million evs,
and you know, they've gained more market share doing this,
and the program starts to break even, I think they
(13:56):
can say that it's a pretty good success and they
can really build on that. Not then they've got a
lot of stranded capital and a lot of factories that
aren't producing much, and they'll probably end up having a
way off workers who work in those plans.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
David, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Good problem Thanks Chris.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura.
This episode is produced by Alex tie. It was edited
by Aaron Edwards and Mark Millian, who was fact checked
by Adriana Tapia, and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sagura.
Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is
Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver. Our
executive producer is Nicole Beemster. Board Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's
(14:39):
head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show and if
you want to learn more, David Welch wrote a book
called Charging Ahead, GM Mary Bara and the Reinvention of
an American Icon. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
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