While questions still loom over what kind of impact the Trump Administration will have on electric vehicles sales, General Motors hit an important milestone toward scaling its electric fleet this past quarter.
In the last quarter of 2024, General Motors said it had become “variable profit positive” for the first time for its electric portfolio—meaning that the money GM is making from each electric vehicle sale (plus the EV manufacturing credits GM gets for making its own battery cells and assembling battery packs) is enough to cover the cost of making each car. While it’s still not enough to cover things like the costs of GM’s EV plants or labor, it’s a step in that direction as the carmaker adapts for the future.
GM pointed to other signs of traction in its EV business during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, with GM CEO Mary Barra stating that the company had “doubled our market share over the course of the year.”
Still, analysts are quick to point out that it will still take some time for General Motors to reach the economies of scale needed to cover the steep costs of manufacturing electric vehicles and to start turning a profit on its EV business.
“It was good that they did it,” David Whiston, a Morningstar U.S. equity strategist told Fortune in an email about GM’s EV business becoming variable profit positive. “But their EV business still loses money as they don’t have the volume yet to recoup all the costs yet.”
“They still have a long way to go,” James Picariello, senior automotive research analyst at BNP Paribas Exane, said in an interview. While GM doesn’t break out specific losses for EVs in its financial statements, Picariello has estimated that GM lost some $2.5 billion on the 189,000 electric vehicles it built and sold to dealerships last year. (GM sold more than 4 million gas engine vehicles to dealerships in the same year)
For 2025, General Motors wants to improve those figures and says it plans to manufacture and sell about 300,000 electric vehicles to dealerships. That would help the automaker cover some of those fixed costs. On its earnings call, GM said that the company was expecting somewhere around $2 billion in savings improvement for its EV portfolio if it can get to that projection.
That would put GM about $500 million short of breaking even by the end of this year, according to Picariello, should his 2024 EV loss estimates be correct.
But there’s another hiccup, too. In its 2025 projections, GM chose not to incorporate the impact of a likely repeal to the consumer tax credit for EVs—a $7,500 credit for consumers who purchase EVs that was incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden Administration. It’s widely expected that the Trump Administration will eliminate this credit at some point this year. And, it’s also up for debate whether the Administration could decide to gut the battery manufacturing credit General Motors and other automakers have benefitted from, too. These scenarios could alter GM’s projections as they could lead to dings in both consumer demand for EVs or the variable profitability GM just achieved.
In reply to questions about it on the Tuesday call, General Motors CFO Paul Jacobson said that “there’s a lot of moving parts out there” and that “we’ve got multiple playbooks that we have been working on.”
“There are really infinite permutations on policy, and we didn’t want to get into advocacy in our guidance,” he said, adding: “But rest assured: We’ve got plans in place and we’re continuing to work proactively with the Administration and with Congress on what we think are the right things to do.”
General Motors’ EV sale projections have been wrong before. GM had discussed selling somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 electric vehicles to dealerships last year, even though consumer demand led GM to make and sell only 189,000.
The good news for General Motors is that they should be able to make up for whatever they lose from EVs via their profitable gas engine vehicles, Picariello says. But it might be another year—or several—before GM’s electric vehicle business can stand on its own.
Correction, Jan. 30, 2025: This article has been corrected to reflect that GM’s variable profitability is inclusive of its labor costs.
