Just a few years back, General Motors and Ford were fully invested in electric vehicles, pouring billions into these initiatives. Currently, the two leading American car manufacturers are scarcely discussing EVs with their shareholders.

TechCrunch collaborated with Hudson Labs, a financial research organization based in New York, to evaluate the past seven years of GM and Ford’s quarterly earnings calls and discovered that both firms are mentioning EVs less frequently compared to the period prior to the pandemic.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has kept up with recent developments. Both manufacturers have modified, postponed, or completely scrapped plans for upcoming EV models, leading to layoffs and scaled-back factory initiatives. While GM and Ford still produce EVs and have new models in their development pipelines, their overall emphasis has shifted, which is evident in the statistics.

Jim Cain, a representative for GM, stated that “quality is more important than quantity.”

“We’ve consistently made it clear that our belief is that EVs are the ultimate goal, the strength of our current portfolio, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, the awards we’ve achieved, our expanding EV market share, and our dedication to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to boost profitability,” he mentioned in an email statement.

However, he added, “we spend time on calls discussing growth prospects such as software and services and autonomous technology, as well as addressing complex topics of interest to analysts/investors like trade and regulatory policy implications, operational performance, capital distribution, regional performance, headwinds, and tailwinds — all while ensuring that at least half of the call is reserved for Q&A.”

Ford spokesperson David Tovar emphasized the company’s upcoming launch of its “Universal Electric Vehicle” platform next year. “[W]e believe the first product coming off the production line, a midsize pickup truck, will perfectly fit the EV market regarding cost, price, and technology,” he remarked.

For this evaluation, TechCrunch omitted the seemingly third member of the Detroit Big Three, Stellantis, for several reasons. This automaker, which resulted from the 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group, has typically lagged behind its U.S. peers in EV adoption. Until the first quarter of this year, Stellantis had also conducted comprehensive earnings calls only twice a year, unlike most public companies that hold them quarterly.

Hudson Labs acquired earnings call transcripts from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and utilized its Co-Analyst — an AI research tool designed for high-precision financial analysis — to tag each sentence with relevant topics. It then calculated the incidence of these topics, along with each topic’s share of the dialogue, resulting in the charts displayed below.

General Motors

GM made a move towards mass-market EVs before many other major manufacturers. It introduced the Bolt EV at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2016 and made the vehicle available for purchase by the end of that year — a significant six months earlier than Tesla’s initial deliveries of the Model 3.

EVs truly became a central point of GM’s earnings calls as its investment surged in 2019 and into 2020. At that time, the company was hinting at new models produced in the U.S. and discussing the transformation of Cadillac into an all-electric brand. GM increasingly focused on its EV strategies through early 2021, with over 100 references to electric vehicles during each of its final two earnings calls in 2020. This indicated that EVs comprised roughly a third of the total discourse during those calls.

Aside from a drop in the first quarter of 2021, when global companies faced a significant chip shortage, GM dedicated nearly the subsequent four years — notably during President Biden’s administration — to discussing EVs for about a quarter of each earnings call. (Another significant decline occurred in the first quarter of 2025 due to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which overshadowed that earnings call.)

Following Trump’s return to office, he eliminated environmental regulations that had encouraged zero-emission vehicles and his administration repealed the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs. Concurrently, GM’s discussions about EVs dropped considerably, decreasing from 82 mentions during the second-quarter call in 2025 to merely 21 during its most recent call concerning Q2 2026.

While GM is still the second-largest seller of EVs in the U.S., the company that once pledged to be fully electric by 2035 is now more focused on how it has “align[ed] our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint with the shifts in regulatory policy” — whenever it mentions EVs at all.

Ford

Ford’s significant entry into the mass-market EV sector was the Mustang Mach-E, which launched in late 2019. As the company neared the delivery of its first models in late 2020, it began to highlight electric vehicles more frequently during its earnings calls.

Aside from a similar decline in mentions during the Q1 2021 call, hampered by discussions about the global semiconductor crunch, Ford — like GM — started dedicating around a third of each quarterly investor meeting to EV discussions. These talks intensified with the introduction of its second significant EV model, the F-150 Lightning, in 2021. This level of emphasis mostly persisted through the Biden administration, as his administration allocated federal funds for charging stations and EV manufacturing incentives while shaping policies related to the battery material supply chain.

However, Ford began talking less about EVs ahead of the 2024 election. By mid-2024, the company was already retreating from some of its largest contemporary EV investments in favor of a skunkworks project that ultimately evolved into the Universal Electric Vehicle platform. Conversations regarding EVs further declined after Trump took office, with CEO Jim Farley spending increased time discussing support for the president’s protective trade policy and the company’s immediate focus on its higher-margin gas F-Series trucks.

Nonetheless, during Ford’s latest call, Farley emphasized that the company “will become a significant scaled competitor as we invest in affordable, versatile EVs.” But for that to materialize, investors will need to wait until at least next year.