GM expects EV revenue of $50B in 3 years

General Motors says it will generate more revenue from electric vehicles in 2025 than crosstown rival Ford Motor Co. brought in from its F-Series pickup line last year.

More importantly, those EVs will be "solidly profitable" by then, GM says, with margins nearly matching those of its internal combustion vehicles. And it plans to build a lot of EVs — 1 million a year at five North American assembly plants, a pace that will require at least three U.S. battery plants to build a total of 1.2 million cells a day.

GM is projecting low- to mid-single-digit margins on EVs by mid-decade, when emissions credits and software and aftersales revenue are included. It expects to generate more than $50 billion in revenue from EVs and $225 billion in total revenue in 2025.

That compares with global revenue of $127 billion for GM in 2021. Ford has said it generated nearly $40 billion from selling about 850,000 F-Series in North America last year.

GM said its EV profitability estimates do not include the impact of forthcoming federal tax credits.

"We actually estimate that these tax credits are going to be worth $3,500 to $5,500 per vehicle coming from GM through 2025," GM CFO Paul Jacobson said at GM's Investor Day last week. "Together, these credits could add 5 to 7 points of margin to the EVs, which puts us in a position where the tax credits are accelerating what we were already going to do and get our vehicles to ICE-like margins by 2025."

Separately, GM believes it can save $2,000 per vehicle by expanding a digital retailing platform and shifting to a regional fulfillment model for EVs. The automaker already has opened two centralized EV fulfillment centers in California and one in the Southeast. The inventory management change is designed to speed vehicle delivery times — to as few as four days — and increase efficiency, which will reduce distribution costs, President Mark Reuss said during the investor event.

"The biggest enterprisewide cost savings will come as we and the dealers change how we handle inventory, which means we're reducing how much we're ... incentivizing vehicles that were ordered that aren't popular," Reuss said. "At the same time, we'll improve the customer experience by delivering the exact vehicles our customers want quickly and efficiently."

The strategy leverages GM's U.S. franchised dealership network for a competitive advantage, including over startups that sell EVs directly to consumers, Reuss said. Dealerships will continue to receive EVs for test drives and immediate delivery, but GM will hold additional EVs at the regional centers. GM has said the approach reduces floorplan costs and the likelihood that unpopular vehicles will sit on dealership lots.

GM also has launched a digital retailing tool that currently works with the Chevrolet Bolt EV. Reuss said the platform will expand to include Cadillac in 2023. About 3,200 dealerships are enrolled in the platform, representing about 80 percent of GM's U.S. network, he said.

The 1 million EVs GM plans to build in 2025 is equal to nearly half of the 2.1 million total vehicles it produced in North America last year, according to estimates from the Automotive News Research & Data Center. Only about 33,000 of the vehicles it made last year were electric.

Jacobson said GM's annual capital spending through 2025 will range from $11 billion to $13 billion, a reflection of its aggressive plans to ramp up production of EVs and the proprietary Ultium batteries that will power them, he said.

"We believe the EV market will be even bigger by 2025 than the 17 percent share of industry that a lot of third-party forecasters are predicting," he told reporters. "And we're going to do that with great design, quality, performance and more price points than anybody else can offer."

GM said its U.S. battery cell capacity should top 160 gigawatt-hours by the middle of the decade. At the same time, its battery cell costs should decline from about $87 per kilowatt-hour in 2025 to less than $70 per kWh in the second half of the decade, Jacobson said.

The company projected that total revenue will increase 12 percent annually through 2025, with growth coming not only from EVs but also from software, its BrightDrop electric delivery van unit and Cruise, the self-driving vehicle company majority-owned by GM, Jacobson said.

GM said BrightDrop is on pace for $1 billion in revenue next year, en route to as much as $10 billion in revenue and 20 percent profit margins by decade's end. The automaker said BrightDrop has more than 25,000 reservations and letters of intent from customers including Walmart, Hertz and Verizon, and it will launch a subscription-based software platform in 2023 to give commercial customers more operational visibility through a user portal and mobile apps.

GM sells four EVs at U.S. dealerships today: the Cadillac Lyriq midsize crossover, the GMC Hummer EV pickup, the Chevrolet Bolt EV hatchback and the Bolt EUV compact crossover. Next year, it plans to launch electric versions of the Chevy Silverado, Equinox and Blazer; an SUV version of the Hummer; and a hand-built Cadillac electric sedan, the Celestiq.

Buick, which plans to introduce its first U.S. EV in 2024, and Cadillac are expected to have fully electric lineups by the end of the decade.

GM opened its first Ultium battery plant, in Ohio, this year. A second plant, in Spring Hill, Tenn., is slated to open in 2023, followed by a third, near Lansing, Mich., by the end of 2024. Indiana appears to be the likely location for a fourth battery plant, but Jacobson declined to share details last week.