GM CEO Mary Barra: We’re Pivoting Back to Hybrids

At an Automotive Press Association appearance on December 4, 2023, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said GM was considering bringing back hybrids. “We have the technology,” she said. “We’ll continue to look at where the market is, where the regulatory environment is.”

Now, market factors such as customer demand, problems with building electric models, and government pollution standards have caused Barra to admit that GM will begin building plug-in hybrids. Her comments came last Tuesday in a fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts.

She reiterated that GM is still on track to convert its portfolio to all-electric by 2035, as it promised in January 2021, “but in the interim, deploying plug-in technology in strategic segments will deliver some of the environmental benefits of EVs as the nation continues to build its charging infrastructure.”

She declined to say when we’ll see plug-in hybrids, or in which market segments GM will offer them. “We plan to deliver the program in a capital- and cost-efficient way because the technology is already in production in other markets. We’ll have more to share about this down the road.”

It’s lost on no one that GM had a leg up on plug-in hybrids with the Chevrolet Volt, which went on sale in December of 2010. The second-generation Volt, which had an upgraded powertrain and more battery capacity, went on sale in October of 2015. But GM pulled the plug on the slow-selling Volt in 2019 and began doubling down on plans to produce electric vehicles.

GM likely should have further refined a hybrid portfolio, as other manufacturers such as Toyota and Hyundai were doing, rather than dropping the technology altogether. “GM not only had a head-start on hybrids with the Volt but also with the SUVs more than a decade ago,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president for global forecasting for Pennsylvania-based AutoForecast Solutions. “Had they not decided on taking the all-EV route, they could have had a usable, and arguably more popular, hybrid lineup.

“The emissions regulations are going to require something more than the eventuality of electric vehicles,” he continues. “With the slowing transition to EVs, it makes sense to add hybrids to your lineup, especially since many of your products are V-8-powered trucks, and what are traditionally high-polluting models.”

Also in play is a “slowing of the transition to EVs,” Fiorani said. Early adopters jumped on EVs when they first became available, but the balance of customers have been more cautious about entering the EV market when they perceive that range and infrastructure may not be at the levels they require to abandon their ICE vehicles.

“Everybody anticipated that the growth would continue at this sharp angle, and it’s just not happening,” Fiorani said. “As we transition out of the early adopters, it’s been more difficult to move customers out of their ICE vehicles and into an EV.”

Indeed, simply building EVs and getting them to market has been difficult for GM, in part due to issues with weakened demand and with producing the Ultium battery platform. In a February forecast by AutoForecast Solutions, GM said it planned to build 416,300 EVs in 2023. Actual production was 120,900.

Presently, the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray is the only hybrid in GM’s North American lineup. As Barra mentioned, GM builds hybrids in other markets, most notably China.

But Fiorani said that simply bringing the Chinese hardware and software here won’t solve GM’s problems. The Chinese hybrids are mostly smaller vehicles, and one issue will be finding a vehicle small enough in the U.S. fleet to use the same technology. “There’s a potential that they could use it in vehicles the size of the Chevrolet Trax, which is produced in South Korea. But the big meat will be hybrids that compete with Ford and Toyota in full-sized trucks.” Both Ford (as of the 2021 model year) and Toyota (as of 2022 MY) currently offer hybrid versions of their full-size trucks, and hybrid offerings in that segment would go a long way to helping GM meet emissions goals across its portfolio.

So when can we expect to see some new hybrids from GM? “This will not be an overnight thing,” Fiorano said, because GM will have to bring back engineering they haven’t used in a decade and raise it to current levels.

“It’s important to note that GM and the rest of the industry should have seen this coming,” Fiorani said, “and should have been better prepared. Toyota, Ford, Honda—a few of these companies have hybrids in their lineup, and companies like Toyota didn’t expect the transition to EVs to happen anytime soon. Something between those two extremes probably would have been the best course of action.”

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