General Motors is shifting gears from going green to going after the green.
With demand for EVs in low gear, GM is investing $4 billion to make more gasoline-powered vehicles and to do so in the United States, according to Axios.
Michigan, Kansas, and Tennessee plants are expected to start more production in 2027.
GM’s Detroit-area Orion Assembly plant, once touted as the home for EV production, will instead be making gas-powered full-size SUVs and pickups.
As the gasoline-powered Chevy Equinox moves into the fast lane of sales, GM is expanding its Fairfax Assembly plant near Kansas City. The expansion includes work currently done in Mexico transitioning to the facility.
Production of the gas-powered Chevy Blazer will likewise take place in Spring Hill, Tennessee, instead of Mexico.
The decision was backed by the United Auto Workers.
“GM’s decision to invest billions in American plants and prioritize U.S. workers is exactly why we spoke up in favor of these auto tariffs,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement.
“The writing is on the wall: the race to the bottom is over. We have excess manufacturing capacity at our existing plants, and auto companies can easily bring good union jobs back to the U.S. They can prove the naysayers wrong by investing in our communities and putting workers before corporate greed. GM is showing that it can be done,” he said.
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Although four years ago GM claimed it could have an all-EV lineup by 2035, GM’s investment in gasoline-powered vehicles means the company is “giving up any hope of achieving” the 2035 goal, Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry, a Detroit-based research firm, reacted following the announcement, according to Politico.
GM said it was not changing its faith in EVs.
“We still believe in an all-EV future,” the company said in a statement.
The company’s 2035 goal “was aspirational. It was more an idea than a strategy,” Alan Baum, an independent Detroit auto analyst, remarked.
“GM’s doing a better job than many of their competitors, but there’s obviously a relatively low ceiling because of the lack of supportive policy,” he said.
And there is the fact that many people just plain do not want an electric vehicle.
A recent American Automobile Association survey found only 16 percent of the American adults responding that they were either “likely” or “very likely” to buy an EV for their next vehicle, according to Autoweek.
That figure was the lowest in the survey since 2019.
Meanwhile, the number of respondents saying they were “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to buy an EV increased to 63 percent, up from 51 percent in 2022.
Money factored into how respondents view EVs, with 62 percent saying they were turned off by high battery repair costs while 59 percent said EVs cost too much.
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