Is this April 1 or did someone hack CNBC? This sounds like one of their Tesla headlines, but it's about GM...
GM’s race to outflank Tesla may be stalling out
"Back in 2017, General Motors CEO
Mary Barra painted a future in which America’s largest carmaker would prosper by phasing out the American Graffiti vision of V8-powered freedom on the open road. GM would launch 20 models of electric cars by 2023, beginning early this year, she said, preparing for a time when cars would drive themselves and many people would use ride-hailing services rather than own cars themselves.
But as hard as GM is pushing, the world pushes back. The company denies claims in the trade press that it missed its self-imposed deadline for the first two product introductions this spring, saying two models introduced in
Chinakept the vow. But a slowdown in China, a ratcheting up of trade tensions and the looming expiration of a key U.S. tax credit to encourage EV adoption still promise to make the job harder."
If
GM has made any mistakes in pushing toward its future, it’s probably that it began its EV push in 2010 with its lower-end Chevrolet brand when the most eager early EV buyers wanted higher-end cars like
Teslas.
“There are multiple elements that go into the price of an EV, including battery cost, leveraging the China market to achieve global scale on a common architecture and gaining manufacturing efficiency with less complexity, ” said Doug Parks, GM’s vice president of autonomous and electric vehicle programs, in an e-mail interview. “We are focused on all these items to drive profitability.“
But Krebs is dubious this strategy can be pulled off as rapidly as GM says it can — though she didn’t offer an alternate timeline.
Cruise has struggled to overcome many of the same obstacles as other self-driving car research efforts. A
report last week in The Information, a Silicon Valley digital publication, said the company’s effort to launch an autonomous vehicle-powered taxi service is behind schedule because of software and other issues that leave the vehicles, for now, slower than regular cars and unable to consistently identify common driving situations, like nearby sirens."
