As the US EV market undergoes dramatic adjustment, General Motors has chosen to double down against the wind. On the 21st local time, President Mark Reuss reiterated at the GM Forward event in New York that the company will not exit the EV race, but instead will launch products that better suit American tastes and raise its competitiveness.
His confidence comes from a global perspective: one in every four vehicles sold on Earth is electric, and that share will keep climbing. "We are a global company, and we won't leave the field—we will only embrace the trend." Reuss emphasized that GM's investments in batteries, EV platforms, software, energy management and advanced manufacturing are all bets on an electrified future; although multiple powertrain options remain available to consumers for now, the long-term commitment has not changed, and when the US market is ready for large-scale adoption, supply must keep up.
AI plus new batteries: compressing a four-year timeline to two
The real highlight of the day's roadmap is GM's plan to use AI and virtualization technology to cut its original 4-to-5-year new vehicle development process directly in half, leveraging a more powerful computing architecture to build software-defined vehicles and launch a fourth-generation platform spanning multiple crossovers.
Underpinning this strategy is a cheaper battery. The new platform targets the mainstream market and will adopt lower-cost lithium-rich manganese-based batteries—cutting both manufacturing costs and purchase prices, with pricing close to lithium iron phosphate while energy density rivals high-nickel batteries; the next-generation models require 20% less battery capacity than the previous generation, vehicle weight is further reduced, and with a centralized computing architecture, both efficiency and experience improve.
External signals also lend support: in September this year, EVs already accounted for roughly 30% of European sales, and GM's experience in the Chinese market confirmed the same trend even earlier. Despite continued volatility in the US domestic market, Reuss believes electrification will only grow in importance, with new vehicles hitting the road "soon after" to show the results.