Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all-in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now, the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors.
TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to analyze the last seven years of GM and Ford quarterly earnings calls and found that both companies are talking about EVs at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic.
This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s followed the news over the last two years. Both companies have altered, delayed, or outright abandoned plans for new EV models, prompting layoffs and scaled back factory plans. And while GM and Ford still sell EVs and have new models in their product pipelines, their collective focus has shifted, and it shows in the data.
Jim Cain, a spokesperson for GM, said that “quality counts more than quantity.”
“We’ve been very clear and consistent in communicating our view that EVs are the end game, the strength of our portfolio today, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, awards we’ve won, our growing EV market share, and our commitment to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to improve profitability,” he said in an emailed statement.
But, he added: “we devote time on the calls to discuss growth opportunities like software and services and autonomous technology, and address complex topics of analyst/investor interest like trade and regulatory policy impacts, operating performance, capital allocation, regional performance, headwinds and tailwinds — all while making sure at least half the call is devoted to Q&A.”
Ford spokesperson David Tovar, meanwhile, pointed to the company’s planned launch of its new “Universal Electric Vehicle” platform next year. “[W]e think the first product rolling off the line, a midsize pickup truck, will hit the sweet spot of the EV market for cost, price, and technology,” he said.
For this analysis, TechCrunch excluded the ostensible third of the Detroit Big Three, Stellantis, for a few reasons. The automaker, which emerged in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group, traditionally lagged behind its U.S. counterparts in EV adoption. Stellantis also, until the first quarter of this year, held comprehensive earnings calls only twice a year, instead of four times annually, like most public companies.
Hudson Labs sourced earnings call transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019, and used its Co-Analyst — an AI research tool purpose-built for high-precision financial research — to assign topic tags to each sentence. It then counted the frequency of those topics as well as each topic’s share of the discussion to produce the charts below
GM bet on mass-market EVs before most other major automakers. It debuted the Bolt EV at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2016, and put the car on sale by the end of that year — a healthy six months or so ahead of Tesla’s first deliveries of the Model 3.
EVs really became a focus of GM’s earnings calls as its investment ramped up in 2019 and into 2020. At that point, the company was teasing new made-in-the-U.S. models and talking about transforming Cadillac into an all-electric brand. GM spent an increasing amount of time talking about its EV plans through early 2021, with more than 100 references to electric vehicles on each of its last two earnings calls in 2020. That meant EVs accounted for roughly a third of the overall discussion on those calls.
Aside from a dip in the first quarter of 2021, when companies around the world were dealing with a major chip shortage, GM spent nearly the next four years — notably while President Biden was in office — dedicating around a quarter of each earnings call to discussing EVs. (Another notable dip came in the first quarter of 2025 was attributable to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which dominated that earnings call.)
After Trump regained office, he slashed environmental regulations that incentivized zero-emissions vehicles, and his party tore up the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs. At the same time, GM’s talk of EVs dropped significantly, from 82 mentions on the second-quarter call in 2025, to just 21 on its most recent call covering Q2 2026.
While GM remains the second-largest seller of EVs in the U.S., the company that once made the lofty promise to go all-electric by 2035 is now talking more about how it has “align[ed] our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint with the changes in regulatory policy” — when it talks about EVs at all.
Ford’s first serious entry into the world of mass-market EVs was the Mustang Mach-E, which debuted in late 2019. As the company got closer to delivering the first models in late 2020, it started talking more and more about electric vehicles on its earnings calls.
Aside from a similar dip in mentions on the Q1 2021 call, which was bogged down by talk of the global semiconductor shortage, Ford — like GM — started spending around a third of each quarterly investor check-in talking about EVs. Those discussions were buoyed by the launch of its second major EV model, the F-150 Lightning, in 2021. And that level of focus largely held through the Biden years, as his administration freed up federal money for charging stations and EV manufacturing credits, while shaping policy around the battery material supply chain.
Ford began talking less about EVs before the 2024 election, though. By the middle of that year, the company was already backing away from some of its largest contemporary EV investments in favor of a skunkworks project that ultimately became the Universal Electric Vehicle platform. Talk of EVs dipped further after Trump took office, with CEO Jim Farley spending more time discussing support for the president’s protectionist trade policy and the company’s near-term focus on its higher-margin gas F-Series trucks.
Still, on Ford’s most recent call, Farley talked up the idea that the company “will become a major scaled competitor as we invest in affordable, versatile EVs.” But for that to happen, investors will have to wait until at least next year.
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Sean O'Kane Sr. Reporter, Transportation
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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