GM (somehow up 1%) appears to have modeled its most recent quarter off Nikola… you know, that truck company that “drove” a semi down a hill by letting gravity do the engineering.

After years of promising an “all-electric future,” General Motors is now quietly shoving that Tesla poster under the bed and pretending it never happened. The company announced a $1.6 billion hit to earnings this quarter as it reassesses the value of its electric vehicle factories, equipment, and supplier contracts… kind of like that Bart Simpson “nothing to see here” meme as he slowly backs into the bushes.

About $1.2 billion of that comes from writing down the value of its EV plants and equipment (RIP to those new Ultium facilities they just had to build). The remaining $400 million is being tossed onto the canceled supplier contracts burn pile. Somehow GM shares are up 1% today, which honestly could’ve been worse considering the size of the hit. Maybe shareholders are just taking this as a win… finally giving up on that expensive EV dream.

(Source: TipRanks)

The slowdown has been building since the start of 2024, but it slammed into a brick wall in late September when Trump shredded the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EV purchases… the same incentive that convinced a lot of buyers to “go green” in the first place. Without it, demand for battery-powered cars got thrown into the ocean. GM’s CFO Paul Jacobson admitted profitability was always about scale, saying, “The reality is we’re probably going to scale up much slower now.”

In case you were wondering, GM isn’t the only one getting pantsed by Trump’s EV tax cut. Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and Stellantis are all walking back their big EV plans. Volkswagen scrapped an electric sedan for the U.S. market. Jeep and Ram are reviving gas-powered models. Ford is delaying battery plants while its EV division continues to bleed billions. It’s like the entire industry woke up and realized you can’t sell $70,000 electric trucks to people still financing their iPhones.

So GM’s doing what it does best… going back to gas guzzlers. The company’s throwing $4 billion at SUVs and trucks, the kind you see tailgating outside every SEC football game, blasting Luke Combs and burning through half a tank before kickoff. And yes, GM swears it’s “still committed to electrification,” but we all know this “let’s compete with Tesla” experiment is officially over.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla and Ford as mentioned in the article.