Investor's Corner
General Motors emphasizing faster electric vehicle launches after positive 2021 earnings
General Motors (NYSE: GM) is gearing up for a major shift in 2022 thanks to its evolving electric vehicle program, planning for record profit levels that could surge the company into a more well-rounded placement in an increasingly competitive sector. The automaker is preparing for faster vehicle launches, according to CEO Mary Barra, who said more models would come to the market at a quicker pace. GM reported its Earnings for Q4 and its guidance for 2022 last night, sharing expansive details for the coming years, including new models, production plans and start dates, and more information regarding GM’s Cruise investment.
In general terms, General Motors reported a strong Q4 and Full Year 2021 in terms of financials. GM’s 2021 full-year earnings included a net income of $10.019 billion, a net income margin of 7.9 percent, and revenue of over $127 billion, a $4.5 billion increase from 2020. For Q4, GM had a weaker quarter than it did in the same period in 2020. The company reported $33.584 billion in revenue for Q4 ’21, which is nearly $4 billion less than Q4 ’20. Net income also decreased, but the full-year figures and profits undoubtedly outshine the losses for the quarter.
“For the full year, we generated $127 billion in revenue, $14.3 billion in EBIT-adjusted, 11.3% EBIT-adjusted margin, $7.07 in EPS diluted adjusted, and $2.6 billion in adjusted automotive free cash flow,” GM CFO Paul Jacobson said. “In the fourth quarter, we generated $34 billion in revenue, $2.8 billion in EBIT-adjusted, 8.5% EBIT-adjusted margin, $1.35 in EPS diluted adjusted, and $6.4 billion in adjusted automotive free cash flow. Free cash flow in the quarter was largely driven by working capital rewind as we were able to complete and wholesale over 80,000 vehicles that had previously been built without certain components, as well as dividends from GM Financial.”
GM’s Earnings Call was the highlight of the evening as it shed new light on the automaker’s planned expansion of its electric vehicle lineup. “We also recognize that we need to launch more EVs faster,” CEO Mary Barra said during the call. GM plans to launch deliveries of the Cadillac LYRIQ in “less than 60 days.” The LYRIQ will join the GMC Hummer EV, which recently started deliveries, as GM’s two newest electric vehicles for consumer use. In the commercial sector, GM said that production of the BrightDrop EV600 will begin late this year at the company’s CAMI Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada. The automaker said that the site currently has a production capacity of 30,000 vehicles and should be doubled by mid-decade.
GMC Hummer EV sports its massive size alongside full-size SUV
GM said that the Silverado, Equinox, and Blazer EVs will all begin deliveries in 2023. The three vehicles will contribute to GM’s plan to deliver 400,000 EVs in North America in 2022 and 2023. These plans are supplemented by battery cell and assembly capacity investments in Michigan, which were recently announced. These new facilities “will give [GM] more than 1 million units of EV capacity in North America by the end of 2025, and this includes 600,000 full-size trucks,” Barra added.
Interestingly, Barra held high regard for Cruise, a fully-autonomous ride-sharing company with investors such as GM, Honda, Softbank, Microsoft, and Walmart. Barra said that riding in a Cruise vehicle a couple of weeks ago was “the highlight of my career as an engineer and as the leader of General Motors.”
“It’s like having an experienced and attentive driver behind the wheel,” Barra said. “Now, as Cruise announced this morning, it is inviting members of the public to sign up for their own driverless rides through a waitlist on the Cruise website. This is the first truly driverless ride-hail service offered to members of the public in a dense urban environment. To maximize its learnings, Cruise will prioritize use cases that are a natural fit for autonomous ride-sharing.”
Barra believes that the first paid rides for Cruise could generate $50 billion by the end of the 2020s.
Semiconductor Forecast
“We saw improved semiconductor availability in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, which enabled us to increase our wholesale sequentially while substantially reducing our inventory of vehicles built without certain components,” Jacobson added. GM expects semiconductor availability to improve throughout 2022, reporting that the company has seen stabilization in the semiconductor environment. This leads GM to believe that it can reach a “normalized run rate toward the beginning of the third quarter [2022] with a target of around 800,000 units in North America on a quarterly basis.” This figure includes GM’s combustion engine vehicles.
Questions from Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner prompted Barra and other GM executives to give more information regarding their opinions of the semiconductor shortage and when it could begin to subside. Barra believes that, by the time Q3 and Q4 2022 roll around, “we’re going to be really starting to see the semiconductor constraints diminish.”
Analyst synopsis
GM’s Earnings Call was strong, giving investors more to be excited about in the way of its EV project and ability to avoid semiconductor issues. “We are big believers in the GM EV strategy as it’s all about converting 10%-15% of its customers to EVs by 2025 with 30 new EV models,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told us. “There are clear challenges, however, with massive resources dedicated towards EVs, we view this as the right move at the right time for Barra & Co.” In terms of keeping up with competitors, namely industry leader Tesla, Ives believes battery tech and GM’s exclusive Ultium platform is the roadmap to success for the Detroit company. “Ultium is the foundational piece of GM’s battery strategy and key to keep up in this EV arms race with Tesla leading the charge,” Ives added.
Ives has a “Buy” rating on GM stock with an $85 price target. Ives is ranked 59 out of 7,776 analysts on TipRanks.
GM shares were down 3.43 percent at the time of writing, trading at $52.22 per share.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is not a GM Shareholder.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Quotes provided by the Motley Fool.
Elon Musk
SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know
SpaceX priced its historic IPO at $135 per share today, raising a record $75 billion.
SpaceX officially priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock and raising $75 billion in what is the largest IPO in stock market history. Shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX. The previous record holder was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at $29 billion, followed by Alibaba’s $22 billion offering in 2014.
At $135 per share and roughly 555.6 million shares, the implied valuation sits near $1.75 trillion, which would make SpaceX roughly the seventh largest company in the United States, just above Tesla’s current market cap. Regular investors can request shares at the IPO price through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, though the deal is heavily oversubscribed and most retail allocations will be partial or unfilled. Once trading opens June 12, anyone with a brokerage account can buy SPCX on the open market.
SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation
The valuation is anchored primarily by Starlink. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers as of February 2026 and is adding 750,000 to 1.5 million new users per month, with the connectivity segment already posting a $1.19 billion profit last quarter. The offering also bundles in xAI following SpaceX’s all-stock merger earlier this year, adding Grok and the Colossus supercomputer to the investment thesis. As Teslarati reported, Starlink ended 2025 with $10 billion in revenue, a figure analysts project could reach $24 billion by end of 2026.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been vocal in his support. “I think the time is right,” Ives said, adding that the offering expands the Elon Musk ecosystem rather than competing with Tesla. An average 12-month price target of $165 per share represents roughly 22% upside from the IPO price. Not everyone agrees – Motley Fool noted xAI is spending $1 billion per month playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a single stated purpose. “Elon founded SpaceX with a goal to change humanity, to make us a multi-planet species,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the company’s retail roadshow video this week. Musk himself has been more direct: “We are building the systems and technologies necessary to provide global connectivity on Earth and beyond, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is currently listed as a Level 2 suite in terms of its passenger cars. As its Robotaxi platform continues to move quickly, it has been recognized as a Level 4 ride-sharing program by the State of Texas, as Tesla recently self-certified itself.
However, a Wall Street analyst is arguing that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has effectively achieved Level 4 autonomy in most conditions in all of its vehicles, drawing on personal experience and data released by the company.
Alex Potter of Piper Sandler said in a note to investors on Wednesday that “Tesla has solved the self-driving puzzle,” pointing to decisions to offer insurance discounts for FSD-enabled policies as a signal of confidence, which is backed up by stellar safety records compared to human driving.
Investing.com initially reported on Potter’s new note.
Additionally, Potter looks at the recent start of Cybercab production at Giga Texas as a potential indication that Tesla is ready to offer some level of unsupervised driving at least in the near future. The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals, completely eliminating the ability for human input.
He also sees Tesla’s allocation of “several hundred million USD (if not $1B+)” as confidence internally, seeing as it would be tough to set aside that amount of capital toward a project that the company does not see as relatively near-term.
Forward thinking, especially as Cybercab has no human controls, it would make sense that Tesla is at least close to self-driving. How close is another question.
Tesla has routinely teased that unsupervised FSD is close, but there are still a lot of things it feels as if the company has to roll out some more capability, including unsupervised parking features, known as “Banish,” better operation with regional self-driving performance, and other improvements.
That is not to say that Tesla FSD is super impressive already. It has already completed coast-to-coast drives across the United States and Canada, it routinely takes the stress out of driving for most people, and it has proven through Tesla Safety Reports that it is safer and involved in accidents less frequently than humans.
🚨 These are the first-ever FSD safety statistics out of the Netherlands, showing it was over 3.5x safer than human driving on Dutch roads.
The most recent numbers out of Tesla for North America show:
-Over 5.5 million miles between accidents for Teslas using FSD
-660k miles… https://t.co/XKlRzgSGEh pic.twitter.com/HX6kzh0ZKc— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
Even Potter believes it is capable, as he used it to go from Missoula, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in April.
“There’s no substitute for personal experience,” he wrote.
SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
