GM and Ford are talking about EVs less on earnings calls

TechCrunch teamed up with financial research firm Hudson Labs to analyze seven years of GM and Ford quarterly earnings calls, finding that both of the biggest American automakers now talk about EVs at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic. Hudson Labs sourced the transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and used its Co-Analyst AI research tool to tag each sentence by topic, then tallied how often EVs came up and what share of each call’s discussion they occupied.

GM bet on mass-market EVs early, debuting the Bolt EV at CES in January 2016 and putting it on sale by the end of that year — roughly six months ahead of Tesla’s first Model 3 deliveries. EV talk on GM’s earnings calls peaked as its investment ramped up in 2019 and 2020, with more than 100 references to EVs on each of its last two 2020 calls, about a third of the total discussion. Aside from a dip during the 2021 chip shortage, GM devoted roughly a quarter of each call to EVs for nearly four years under the Biden administration. After Trump returned to office and rolled back environmental regulations along with the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, GM’s EV mentions fell from 82 on its Q2 2025 call to just 21 on its most recent call, covering Q2 2026.

GM spokesperson Jim Cain said “quality counts more than quantity,” pointing to the company’s EV market share, customer loyalty, and continued investment in lithium manganese-rich battery technology. Ford followed a similar arc: EV talk built around the Mustang Mach-E’s late-2019 debut and the F-150 Lightning’s 2021 launch held at about a third of each call through the Biden years, then declined before the 2024 election as Ford pulled back from major EV investments in favor of what became its Universal Electric Vehicle platform — a midsize pickup that Ford spokesperson David Tovar said will land at the right combination of cost, price, and technology for the EV market.

TechCrunch excluded Stellantis, the third of Detroit’s Big Three, from the analysis because the automaker — formed in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group — has lagged its US rivals in EV adoption and, until this year, held earnings calls only twice annually instead of four times.

Why it matters

Both automakers still sell EVs and have new models in the pipeline, but the shrinking airtime for EVs on their own earnings calls tracks the broader retreat from EV investment that followed Washington’s rollback of federal incentives — a shift likely to keep shaping how much capital Detroit commits to electrification.