Bulletins

General Motors CEO says GM can catch up to Tesla by 2025

GM shipped only 423,000 vehicles in the quarter, which was around half the shipments from a year prior.

GM, General Motors, Chevy
GM wants to be completely electric by 2035

In an interview with CNBC, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said she believed the company could "absolutely" catch up with Tesla in EV market share. Barra went on to reference GM's growing portfolio of EVs — including the upcoming Hummer, Silverado and Cadillac Lyriq — to make the case for why GM could reasonably achieve this goal.

Last year, GM announced that it would invest $27 billion in EV development. It plans to have as many as 30 different EV models sold globally by 2025.

However, GM's Q3 2021 earnings released earlier this week show that it's still grappling with immediate supply chain issues: The company only shipped 423,000 vehicles in the quarter, which was around half the shipments from a year prior. GM's net profit also declined 40%. For comparison, Tesla shipped 241,300 EVs in Q3 2021, which exceeded analyst expectations.

"Our third-quarter results, which while reflecting the near-term challenges of the global semiconductor supply chain issues, clearly shows the strength of our underlying business," Barra said in the Q3 2021 earnings call on Wednesday. She also said, "We're selling everything we can sell. It is totally due to what we're able to supply."

GM isn't the only automaker that has struggled to keep up with demand.

Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess said that "customer demand is high" but that the Q3 results "show once again that we must now systematically drive forward the improvement in productivity in the volume sector."

Ford also saw its profit for Q3 2021 decline by $600 million compared to the year prior. Its CFO, John Lawler, said in the earnings call on Wednesday: "We're doing everything we can to get our hands on as many chips as we can. But we do see that running through 2022. It could extend into 2023, although we do anticipate the scope and severity of that to reduce as we move through '22 into '23."

Hirsh Chitkara

Hirsh Chitkara ( @HirshChitkara) is a reporter at Protocol focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Before joining Protocol, he helped write a daily newsletter at Insider that covered all things Big Tech. He's based in New York and can be reached at hchitkara@protocol.com.

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