General Motors is one of the automakers with the most ambitious EV strategy yet. The manufacturer is looking to beat Tesla at its own game by the middle of the decade, but apparently, that doesn’t mean GM will abandon the internal combustion engine. In fact, a current company executive confirmed that ICE will be here to stay for years to come and GM will continue to rely on its services.
GM President Mark Reuss recently gave an interview to Fox Business ahead of the company’s investor day presentation in New York. He told our colleagues General Motors was not ready to leave the traditional mainstream segment where combustion-powered models still dominated sales by a wide margin.
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“The ICE era is not over,” Reuss said Fox Business. “We’re not going to abandon our internal combustion engine segment. We have a truck lead with GMC and Chevrolet. We have it in our mid-size trucks, our full-size trucks, and so on.”
If you’ve followed the auto industry closely in recent years, you won’t be too surprised by Reuss’ statement. More and more automakers are strengthening their combustion-powered portfolios to continue to make money and start investing in electric vehicles. In GM’s case, the company wants to pour about $35 billion into EV and autonomous technology by the middle of the decade.
In February this year, automaker CEO Mary Barra said General Motors had plans to deliver around 400,000 electric vehicles in North America by 2023 and up to one million EVs in the region by 2025. However, the fast-changing auto industry is forcing GM to to change it. forecasts, and during its Q3 2022 earnings call on October 25, Barra changed the timeline to the first half of 2024 – or six months later than originally planned – for the first goal.
In a new interview, Reuss commented when he expected investments in the EV sector to start bringing in new money and that year would be 2025. “Then we started making money on EVs and the margin structure got really good.”
