2024 'year of execution' for GM as it scales EV production

2024 is "the year of execution" for General Motors as it works to increase production and profitability of its electric vehicles, CEO Mary Barra said Thursday.

Buoyed by a strong internal combustion vehicle portfolio, the automaker needs to prove it also can build and sell EVs on its Ultium battery platform at scale, Barra said at a Wolfe Research investor conference.

"We've got to demonstrate that we can build Ultium-based products and the market wants them and we can achieve our profitability goals," she said, adding that success is within the company's control. "Even though we've said by 2035 our light-duty portfolio will be all-EV, we'll be guided by the consumer."

GM has promised several new EVs this year, including an electric version of its popular Chevrolet Equinox compact crossover aimed at mass-market buyers, but its ability to ramp up production last year was slowed by a problem with manufacturing EV battery modules. The company has taken steps to resolve the issue, including setting up some manual assembly and adding module capacity at more plants.

She reiterated GM's commitment to EVs and said adoption will increase, though at a slower pace. The plodding pace of EV adoption in the U.S. has prompted some automakers to delay production and spending plans. GM has pushed back the start of electric pickup production at its Orion Assembly plant near Detroit until 2025 and delayed the launch of several models, including the Equinox EV and the GMC Sierra EV pickup, by a few months.

The automaker this year plans to produce 200,000 to 300,000 of its Ultium-based EVs in North America from Chevrolet, GMC and Cadillac, along with its BrightDrop commercial electric van unit. GM aims to achieve positive variable profit, excluding fixed costs, on its EVs in the second half of this year and mid-single-digit EV margins in 2025.

"We'll have much better pricing, and this year we're going to have the Blazer and the Equinox that get into that range of where the biggest affordability is, and charging infrastructure will be better," Barra said Thursday.

GM also intends to relaunch its Cruise driverless service in a single city, after the unit halted operations nationwide following an October pedestrian crash in San Francisco. Barra on Thursday did not disclose a timeline for redeploying Cruise's operations in a single city but said "in the pretty near future, I think we'll be signaling where we're going to deploy yet this year."

GM President Mark Reuss said this month at the J.D. Power Auto Summit in Las Vegas that Cruise could return to the road "in the next one to two years." A GM spokesperson clarified that Reuss was referring specifically to driverless Cruise Origin vehicles, which will not be built in 2024, and the company said in a Thursday statement that its goal "is to relaunch in one city with supervised driving with [Chevrolet] Bolt-based Cruise AVs as soon as possible once we have taken steps to rebuild trust with regulators and the public."

"This is a year of execution for us. I'm really excited," Barra said. "I know we're only six weeks in, but we're six weeks on track. And this is going to be a really, I think, high-performance year for GM."