General Motors President Mark Reuss said on Tuesday the automaker is “in for the long haul” on electric vehicles and will not rework its plans each time regulations or fuel prices change.
“Whipsawing on technology and propulsion and regulatory administrations is not the game you want to play,” Reuss said at the Automotive News Congress in Detroit, according to The Detroit News.
“It burns capital. It destroys things faster than you could ever imagine, and you can’t take it out fast enough when you make those big mistakes.”
“So we’re in for the long haul, and we’re maybe a little slower on EVs, for instance. That’s OK, but the whole world is moving that way, and so we invested in the platforms that are EV platforms.”
He spoke a day after the Trump administration released fuel economy rules that U.S. automakers already meet, and as GM absorbs $10.9 billion in EV-related charges.
‘The Long Game’
Reuss said GM’s next round of EV spending would go into its underlying technology rather than new nameplates.
“Our reinvestments in EV will be different than just model changes,” he said.
“They’ll be core investments into the architecture to get profitability and scale with EVs for the long run. That’s playing the long game.”
GM will not make major changes to its product and investment plans because of short-term shifts in regulation or fuel prices, and will instead invest according to what customers want, Reuss said, according to Automotive News.
He pointed to new V-8 and diesel engines GM plans to offer on its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups.
Those engines were “long-term investments” that had been in development for years, before the administration rolled back fuel economy rules and before fuel prices began to soar, he said.
“All we know is that a year from now, it’ll be different,” Reuss said of diesel and gasoline prices. “Those are what people want, and that’s what we’re going to supply.”
Rules Rolled Back
The fuel economy rules released on Monday set a fleetwide goal of roughly 34.9 miles per gallon by 2031, a level US automakers reached in 2024, against the Biden administration’s 52.5 mpg, The Detroit News reported.
The administration has also undone the Environmental Protection Agency’s vehicle greenhouse gas rules and ended fines for missing fuel economy standards.
The $7,500 federal EV tax credit expired on September 30, 2025 and GM has backed away from its earlier goal of an all-zero-emission light-vehicle line-up by 2035.
Same Message From CEO
CEO Mary Barra made the same case at the Automotive Press Association in Detroit in January.
“Our destination is to get to the all-EV future we’ve been talking about,” she said. “It will take longer without the incentives, but I still think we’ll get there over time.”
“I’m a little surprised at some [automakers] that are really pulling away very quickly, because we don’t know what will be in ’29, ’30, ’32.”
A GM spokesperson said in April that “EVs remain the endgame for GM,” denying a report that it had indefinitely suspended its next-generation electric truck programme.
The Cost of the Reset
GM has recorded $10.9 billion in EV-related charges since the second half of 2025.
They include a $1.6 billion charge announced in October 2025, about $6 billion within the $7.1 billion of special charges GM booked in the fourth quarter, and $2.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026.
GM said in a January filing that it had “proactively reduced EV capacity” after the “termination of certain consumer tax incentives and the reduction in the stringency of emissions regulations.”
Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson called the restructuring “a significant, sort of special cash headwind in 2026” in March.
At a J.P. Morgan conference on September 24, he said cash flow would be “substantially better” in 2027 “because we’ll have worked through substantially all of the EV restructuring that we’ve paid this year,” CFO Dive reported.
Sales Slide
GM sold 27,395 EVs in the U.S. in the second quarter, down 40.7% from a year earlier, cutting their share of its deliveries to 3.8% from 6.2%.
The company estimated its share of the U.S. EV market in the first half at 13.5% to 14.0%, second to Tesla.
It sold 169,887 EVs in the U.S. in 2025, up 48%, before fourth-quarter sales fell 43% once the tax credit ended.
GM temporarily laid off 1,300 workers at its Factory Zero EV plant in Detroit from March 16 to April 13 “to align EV production with market demand.”
It has switched its Orion plant in Michigan to combustion-engine vehicles instead of the electric Silverado and Sierra.
