Want a car that can take you on a road trip across the country, can fill up in minutes rather than hours, and can drive more than a hundred or so miles at a time?
Well, then an electric vehicle isn’t for you unless you splurge on one of the high-end Tesla models, as those might have the range and “supercharge” capacity to make a road trip in one slightly less miserable and time-consuming.
But, even then, it isn’t as easy to take a long trip in a Tesla as to just take a combustion-engine power vehicle of any sort when going on a long trip, as you can just fill it up in minutes and keep driving rather than waiting anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours for your car to finish charging every few hundred miles.
And so consumers are shying away from electric cars, making investments in the space, particularly for companies other than Tesla, less valuable for the companies and less likely to pay off, with consumers preferring tried and true cars rather than fancy golf carts.
GM learned that lesson in a particularly painful way, with its recent earnings report showing that, amid its huge investment in the electric vehicle space and push to produce more of those cars, it suffered a 40% net earnings plummet in the second quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. In fact, the car manufacturer reported a net income of $1.69 billion for April through June, which was down a whopping $1.15 billion from $2.84 billion in the same April through June period of 2021. Yikes.
Though there are numerous issues at play that have put a dent in GM’s net earnings, from inflation to supply chain snarls, a major aspect of the situation that the Daily Caller noted is that the over $1 billion net earnings decrease comes at a time when the company has spent a tremendous amount trying to edge into the EV space, saying:
GM’s falling profits come amid its push to produce more EVs, a goal supported by the Biden administration and its climate plans, according to a White House press release. In 2021, GM and other American automakers set a goal to have electric vehicles comprise 40% to 50% of total sales in the U.S. by 2030.
“Consider the scrambling going on now with EVs still under 10% of car sales and well under 1% of the installed global car fleet.”
“As every car maker chases the same (limited) pool of minerals, no one has a plan to supply enough. There won’t be enough for everyone.”
Perhaps the car company should focus on producing cars profitably rather than chasing rare minerals necessary for building high-tech golf carts around the globe so that it can participate in the latest “current thing” and take serious profitability hits while doing so.