EVs and Autonomous Vehicles: General Motors’ Doomed Focus on Unprofitable Boutique Products

The tenure of General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra may soon be ending, but not before billions of additional losses are booked for her disastrous commitment to an all-electric future for the mass market automobile manufacturer. As the great American automobile manufacturer tries to assess the damage and clean up the wreckage from its EV detour, it might be expected that GM would now refocus on selling the vehicles that consumers want to buy, and which dealers excel at selling. Unfortunately, that expectation would be incorrect. 

General Motors is once again distracted by the next shiny thing — self-driving vehicles. The likely successor to Mary Barra as CEO, Sterling Anderson, is a recent hire from the tech industry, and his resume is narrowly specialized in autonomous vehicles.

GM cannot afford any more costly gimmicks or distractions. Unfortunately, its leadership seems congenitally attracted to boutique segments of the auto industry which excite coastal trend-chasers, but which have little appeal to the people buying pickup trucks and sport utilities, the bread-and-butter vehicles of retail auto sales. (RELATED: What’s an ‘EREV’?)

Upon Joe Biden’s election in 2020, Ms. Barra famously pledged to eliminate gasoline-powered, internal combustion vehicles by 2035, producing only EVs by that date. While the Biden administration was heavy-handed in trying to compel an all-EV future, other mass-market auto companies such as Ford and Toyota did not make similar commitments. The Trump administration subsequently reversed its predecessor’s coercive regulations, and Congress defunded EV subsidies with the One Big Beautiful Bill in 2025. But even when subsidies were in place, consumers emphatically rejected electric vehicles manufactured by legacy auto makers. Only Tesla has been successful in establishing a U.S. customer base for EVs, developing a profitable niche as a boutique commuter product for an affluent customer base. (RELATED: Celebrating the End of EVs)

The EV distraction has been financially devastating for GM, with announcements of major losses and multi-billion-dollar charge-offs coming rapidly. In the 4th quarter of 2025 alone, GM booked two separate EV-related charge-offs totaling $7.6 billion. To put that loss into context, GM’s full-year 2024 profit was about $6 billion.

Despite all this, General Motors has still not officially backed away from its all-EV commitment. To this day, its website reads “We are pursuing our vision of a zero-emissions future and driving value for our business, our customers, and our communities.” As reported by a GM Authority piece from September titled “GM Still Focused On EV-Only Future,” Ms. Barra “reaffirmed that the goal is to make GM an all-EV automaker.”

Fortunately for General Motors, and despite the EV distraction, GM’s legacy customers are still loyal to the company’s gasoline-powered pickups and SUVs. 

So, GM is finally going to re-focus on those loyal customers and the products they prefer, right? Of course not. GM is once again pursuing the Tesla niche, this time with a focus on self-driving cars.

Sterling Anderson, GM’s heir apparent to the CEO office, was hired just eight months ago from Aurora Innovation, a tech start-up he cofounded to develop autonomous vehicles. Prior to that, he was involved with Tesla’s autonomous vehicle unit. Since Mr. Anderson’s hiring, several prominent executives have departed the company, presumably because they don’t share his vision for prioritizing self-driving cars. As reported by CNBC a few weeks ago, Mr. Anderson “has consolidated power to oversee ‘the end-to-end product lifecycle’ of GM vehicles, including manufacturing, engineering, battery, software and services product management, and engineering teams, according to GM.”

Despite the massive EV losses that GM has incurred, the company is apparently casting its lot with a tech executive whose profit-and-loss experience is with cash burn rather than cash flow. Mr. Anderson’s startup lost about $4 billion over the past four years on nominal revenue. Aurora has about half a dozen driverless trucks running routes on Texas interstates. GM sells millions of vehicles per year.

What is perhaps most peculiar about General Motors’ pivot toward autonomous vehicles is that it has already had one very expensive failure in that market segment. GM first invested in Cruise, LLC in 2016, ultimately investing $12 billion as it obtained total control of the robotaxi company.  Back in 2017, Mary Barra stated that GM would be testing fully autonomous vehicles “in quarters, not years.” While Cruise initially retrofitted other manufacturers’ electric cars to be self-driving, GM ultimately did build its own Cruise vehicle, called the “Origin.” However, only a few hundred self-driving Cruise Origin robotaxis were built before GM stopped production and surrendered that market space to Waymo. From an AP article dated Dec. 10, 2024, “Since GM bought a controlling stake in Cruise for $581 million in 2016, the robotaxi service piled up more than $10 billion in operating losses while bringing in less than $500 million in revenue…” 

Some futuristic products just don’t have market traction, or can’t reconcile their cost and functionality with what the market will bear. The Concorde supersonic jetliner received its certificate of airworthiness in 1975 and started carrying passengers in 1976, but ultimately only 14 planes were ever flown commercially. Five decades later, none are in service. Supersonic planes served a niche, but had little mass-market utility.  

Human-driven, gasoline-powered vehicles have been the choice of consumers and commercial vehicle buyers for over a century. There is little reason to see that changing any time soon, if ever. Auto manufacturers who focus on that mass market can prosper. Those that don’t will either fail or be relegated to being a niche manufacturer. General Motors is too big to be niche; therefore, it cannot afford to keep booking multi-billion dollar losses in pursuit of flashy trends such as EVs and autonomous vehicles.

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