2 weeks Ago By Naveen Athrappully
General Motors (GM) has trimmed down its EV production range for 2024 by 50,000 vehicles, fearing an oversupply due to softened demand. While industry experts were expecting the EV market to make up 10 percent of total auto sales this year, GM estimates it at 8 percent, General Motors CFO Paul Jacobson said during the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference on June 11. The company subsequently reduced its EV production target for the year from the earlier 200,000–300,000 in 2024 to 200,000–250,000 vehicles.
The decision to bring down the output forecast is “100 percent demand-driven,” the CFO said while pointing to oversupply issues facing the EV market. “We don’t want to end up in a position where we give out a production target and then we just blindly produce and end up with hundreds of thousands of vehicles in inventory because the market’s just not there yet,” he stated. “We were on track to be able to produce, like we said, up to 300,000 [electric] vehicles this year.
But what we don’t want to do is get in this trap of, you know, I think the market a few years ago or even more recently than that, had said, ‘You’ve got to produce more EVs if we’re going to ascribe any value to your company.’” As a result, the EV industry saw an overproduction, which impacted pricing, Mr. Jacobson noted.
On the plus side, the GM CFO feels that despite a slowdown in the market, the company still has seen a “pretty strong” growth in electric vehicles .
