GM’s Mary Barra says the EV transition is still the destination—even if the road is longer

In the dozen years since Mary Barra became chief executive of General Motors, many of the U.S. auto industry’s certainties about the future have evaporated.

Her first job as CEO in 2014 was to remake the century-old company’s corporate culture and regain customers’ trust following a tragic, reputation-wrecking ignition-switch crisis. Barra has since navigated a global pandemic, tariffs and supply-chain chaos, and the rise of AI as an unstoppable and industry-shaking force. Meanwhile, China’s nascence as an electric-vehicle superpower and a whiplash shift in Washington’s approach to EVs have created a sobering reality for every legacy carmaker: The American electric revolution that until recently appeared imminent is proceeding far more slowly than many in Detroit and Washington expected.

A few years ago, automakers were preparing for an environment in which 40% to 50% of their vehicles would need to be electric by 2030. But then the Trump administration unwound key incentives and rules that had encouraged EV adoption, and the regulatory ground shifted beneath their feet. Consumer habits also proved more stubbornly set than PowerPoint presentations had suggested.

“I don’t think it’s shifted our mission,” Barra told me in an interview for Fortune’s Titans podcast, surrounded by gleaming Cadillacs in a Manhattan showroom. “We still think EVs are the endgame.”

For now, Barra is focused on maintaining a broad portfolio of vehicles: GM has more than a dozen EVs in its lineup, but also plenty of highly profitable internal-combustion vehicles. After all, the $185 billion company built its reputation on American pickups and SUVs.

Barra sees the company’s EV approach as less a retreat than a reframe: She’s leaning into GM’s longtime mantra of maximizing customers’ choices. “Wherever the customer is,” she told me, “we have a vehicle.”

And she’s building in a management doctrine of rapid response to the prevailing winds, in Washington and beyond. “The minute we start to sense something might change, what are these no-risk decisions or these no-regret decisions we can make?” she said. “Agility is a superpower now.”

Investors have largely applauded Barra’s embrace of the transition’s messy middle: The stock is trading near its all-time high and is up nearly 6% year to date.

Autonomy takes a longer road

If the ups and downs of the EV transition have taught Detroit anything, it is that a seemingly inevitable outcome can hit roadblocks. It’s a lesson worth remembering when it comes to autonomous driving. Barra, once bullish in forecasting that self-driving cars would arrive quickly, is more measured now. “I’m done making predictions,” she told me.

Still, she is making one meaningful commitment: In 2028, GM expects to offer eyes-off-the-road highway driving on the Cadillac Escalade IQ. It will build on Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free advanced driver-assistance system, which already lets drivers take their hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals on compatible roads.

“What we plan to do in 2028 is you’ll be able to not have to keep your eyes on the road,” Barra said. “And that will be the start of then getting to full autonomy.”

It’s an appealing premise. But Barra knows that the idea will make some consumers uneasy—and GM, more than most companies, knows exactly what happens when customers don’t feel safe. “Safety will be the overriding priority as we roll out this technology,” Barra said.

During the ignition-switch crisis that engulfed GM shortly before Barra became its first female CEO, she found a company mired in what she called at the time a “deeply troubling” culture of bureaucratic inaction—one that had allowed a deadly tech problem to continue for months. It later emerged that the faulty switch had caused at least 124 deaths and 274 injuries. The company ultimately recalled millions of vehicles and paid billions in penalties and settlements.

Barra learned lasting management lessons from the disaster: Solve problems immediately; build mechanisms for employees to surface concerns; and repeat the message until it becomes embedded in the culture. “I don’t want to set it aside and explain it away,” Barra told Fortune’s Geoff Colvin nine months into her tenure, “because I think it uncovered some things in the company that it’s critical we challenge ourselves to change and to fix.” That’s still her approach. “Problems don’t get smaller,” Barra told me. “Rarely do problems get smaller.”

There were also lessons learned from the collapse of Cruise, GM’s costly bet on robotaxis. (GM’s 2016 acquisition of Cruise was valued at roughly $1 billion, including cash, stock, and employee-retention and performance incentives, and GM then invested billions more.) The decision to wind down Cruise and refocus on personal autonomy sharpened the company’s priorities, Barra said. She would still have bought Cruise based on what GM knew at the time, she explained, in part because it brought on board valuable capabilities and talent. But ultimately, it wasn’t the right path. “We don’t run a bus fleet,” she said. “We don’t run a taxi fleet.”

Personal autonomous vehicles, by contrast, are a natural extension of the company’s 118 years of expertise in building vehicles for individual customers. “That’s where we’re focused because I think that’s where our strength is,” she said.

Rebuilding skilled trades

For 39 years Barra’s father was a diemaker at GM—building the industrial tooling to turn raw metal into auto parts. She started at the automaker as an 18-year-old co-op student and rose through engineering, manufacturing, human resources, and product development to the CEO job. That experience informs one of the issues she is now pressing most urgently: rebuilding training programs and interest in skilled trades.

Over the past five years, GM has invested more than $250 million in skilled-trades training. The underlying labor-market case is straightforward: Manufacturers, utilities, construction firms, and data center operators all need people who can build, repair, and operate complex physical systems. Dealer technicians, she notes, can earn salaries in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, or higher.

Barra has a provocative suggestion for high school students intent upon a four-year college degree as the only route to a good life: Consider a skilled trade, which may turn out to be a safer bet these days than many white-collar roles. “We really make sure high school students understand this is a great career and frankly maybe a little more AI-proof than some others,” she said.

Barra’s argument is also cultural. “I frankly think this is an area where Europe has much more respect for the trades and the importance of people who do very technical things,” she noted.

GM is testing how AI can assist, rather than replace, that workforce. She has seen designers use AI-enabled tools to explore aerodynamics digitally—testing how tiny design changes affect airflow before putting the prototype into a physical wind tunnel for testing. “But who knows?” she added. “Maybe at some point the technology will be so accurate we won’t even do that.”

Warren Buffett’s advice

Barra has had plenty of opportunities to learn leadership the hard way. But one of her clearest lessons came over lunch with Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway held a major GM stake when Barra became CEO, and Buffett delivered a crucial vote of confidence in her leadership amid the 2014 recall crisis.

The question Buffett asked the CEO was deceptively simple: Would GM operate differently if it were private and did not have to report earnings every quarter? Barra’s answer was no.

“And he’s like, ‘Great,’” she recalled. “Because he said, ‘I don’t want you running the company for the quarter. I want you running it for the long term. That’s how you’re really going to create value.’”

The moment GM finds itself in today certainly requires some long-game thinking. The company is trying to protect its traditional business while investing through uncertainty—in EVs, autonomy, software, AI, manufacturing, and defense. It is trying to manage policy shifts without allowing Washington to derail its mission. And it is doing so as China races ahead in batteries, robotics, energy technologies, and electric-vehicle scale.

Barra is not naive about the threat. But she remains confident in American workers’ capacity to respond.

“I think we’re making strides,” she said. “I believe in American ingenuity and innovation, and I think we can compete.”

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