GM CEO Mary Barra On Pivoting To Electric Vehicles And Partnering With Tesla

Mary Barra was promoted to CEO of General Motors not long after GM needed to be bailed out (as was Chrysler), in the historic auto bailout of 2008-2009. In the process, she became one of the few women CEOs in the Fortune 500, and GM’s success under her leadership has proved many skeptics wrong.

Now, she’s transforming the 114- year old automaker into a 21^st century all-electric automaker.

In a one-on-one with Rebecca Blumenstein, President of NBC Editorial, at the Aspen Ideas Festival this past week, Barra explained her decision-making processes, from how they decided to go all-EV, to why she made a deal with her arch-competitor Tesla, on EV chargers, and much more.

Here are highlights from their conversation, which provide insights into how A-list leaders make business decisions in today’s unprecdentedly complex economy. (Quotes are cleaned up for brevity)

· “You're overseeing just seismic changes. You're literally phasing out internal combustion engines. As a leader, what's your philosophy? How do you not rest too much on tradition that's made GM excellent, but also just being a change agent?” Blumenstein asked

“I think there's so much changing right now. I believe we have the right strategy when people say, what keeps me up at night is, are we moving fast enough? And so, I think when you're looking to move fast, when you can leverage technology in almost any part of the business, you just have to keep driving that change. One of the things people don't realize about General Motors, I would say almost 40%, maybe higher, of our engineering, our technical talent has been with the company less than five years. And that's because of just normal attrition. And as we did that, we shifted from more of a hardware focus to a software focus. And that really gives you a lot of energy.”

· On betting the whole company on electric vehicles:

“When we looked at what was happening in the industry, and one of the reasons we did that was primarily driven from internal, because at GM we had said we believe in an all-electric future, but there was a lot of internal debate of when. And so, when we looked at our plans and we looked at the regulatory environment, we thought the right thing to do was to get our entire portfolio from a light duty perspective to be all electric by 2035. That was a big statement. But when we did it, we mainly did it because we needed to get everybody internally in the company to stop debating when and start working on how to make sure we get it done. And so, it was a very important announcement because it stopped the debate…. We're still the only, um, full-line manufacturer with all our brands that have made that commitment.”

· Why it’s taking so long for GM to get more EVs on the road?

“In the (20)18 timeframe, we said, if we want really want to convert (to all-EVs) and believe we're going to be in an EV company, we've got to do a dedicated platform. And so, I think it was one of the last days of December of 21 (when) the first vehicle off the (EV-dedicated) Ultium platform, which was the Hummer. And so now we've been ramping that up,.” Barra explained.

“What's held us up right now is getting our battery plants running. We have a battery plant that is now running really well in Ohio. We have another one in construction in Springfield, Tennessee. We have a third in Michigan, and then we just announced about a week ago that our fourth will be in Indiana.…It's all new manufacturing. We're working with different suppliers. But, as we break the roadblocks and learn, we feel we're on track for what we've said we'd achieved this year on our way to 400,000 units by the middle of next year and 1,000,020 in 25.”

· What’s it going to take to ramp up adoption of electric vehicles?

“To get 30, 40, 50% of the population buying new vehicles, you've got to make sure that it is something that solves their every need. And you're, you're reaching customers who, you know, the average price they spend on a new car is between $30 and $35,000. It's their only vehicle. If there's two cars in the household, they both need both of them to go to work. And, they need to know they're going to have reliable charging, that they're going to have reliable service. And so, you know, we're working hard to build that, but those customers we know really well.”

“Also, we're going to have a portfolio of vehicles. We're not replicating our internal combustion engine portfolio, but we're really being strategic about having affordable vehicles, having luxury vehicles. We have a truck franchise right now. We sell more trucks in this country than anyone else, making sure we maintain that with the Silverado EV, the Hummer, as well as the GMC Sierra EV. So, you know, with the vehicles we have now, with what we'll have a year from right now, it will be dramatically different.”

· Barra on GM’s recent agreement with their arch-competitor Tesla on chargers:

GM aggregated different chargers into their apps that their customers use to find charging when they need it was a big issue. “I think one of the breakthroughs was they agreed they would provide the information that it go through ours (apps), and also that we get the same cost for our customers that Tesla customers do. We evaluated it, and then we also looked at it from a customer perspective….We thought the durability of reliability and the cost was cheaper…And then for General Motors, it allowed us in one agreement, starting next year, instead of having 13,000 chargers across this country, available will have 25,000... I think it's going to be better for the consumer.”

· “So, do you think you can trust Elon Musk as a partner, or will you be still viewing him as a competitor?

“Frankly, our team worked very seamlessly with the team at Tesla. I have to say, they were great to work with, and then of course we're going to compete. But I think in a lot of spaces now in many industries, you compete and you partner. So, we're doing a lot of work with Honda. We've done partnerships in the past with Ford. So frankly, I think the industry would benefit from doing more partnerships.”