General Motors says it has a plan to dethrone Tesla: the undisputed king of electric vehicles.
GM CEO Mary Barra said in November that the company responsible for the Chevy Volt would build a million EVs in 2025. The question is, how will it get there, and what steps will it take to dethrone Tesla, who produced more than 509,000 EVs in 2020 and delivered 98% of them.
“We are committed to fighting for EV market share until we are number one in North America,” Barra said after detailing the plans for 30 EV models by 2025. The project requires a $27 billion investment from one of the U.S’s most notorious automakers. But in the past, car companies have outlined their plans to beat Tesla, and they’ve continuously fallen short, not accounting for Tesla’s planned growth.
In 2012, GM was the undisputed leader in EVs. The Chevy Volt sold 23,461 units that year. Then Tesla came along with the Model S. Five years later, Tesla had figured out that it could build a mass-market vehicle with the Model 3, proving that it’s not about the number of models. Still, the focus should be on affordability and efficiency. Tesla showed that it had figured out the formula for a fun, fast, efficient, and affordable electric car. It was a riddle that legacy automakers that had the cash and infrastructure to develop hadn’t solved.
Credit: U.S. Department of Energy, Alternative Fuel Vehicle Data Key: Blue: Chevy Volt, Burgundy: Tesla Model S, Purple: Tesla Model X, Royal Blue: Chevy Bolt, Yellow: Tesla Model 3
Despite the Model 3 giving Tesla and its frontman Elon Musk significant production issues, the vehicle has become the most popular EV in the U.S., China, and other territories. Led by the Model 3, Tesla held 58 percent of the U.S. EV market share in 2019, and Financial Post states that the automaker could own as much as 80 percent of the market share for 2020.
GM’s plan is simple: depend on its Ultium battery, which will amplify production and the development new, all-electric models. It plans to decrease the cost of battery production to the $100/kWh threshold, which will activate price parity with gas cars, in three years. It then plans to get that down to $75/kWh in 2025. These projections come from Emmanuel Rosner, an analyst with Deutsche Bank.
The problem is: Tesla detailed its complete roadmap to decrease the cost of its price per kWh during the company’s Battery Day event in September 2020, and it shows prices as low as $50/kWh.
This brings in significant possibilities for GM moving forward, especially if it can continue to leverage more affordable battery costs past 2025. However, it will need more help beating Tesla, which at this time, analysts see as the leader for the foreseeable future.
A Tesla Model 3 recently battled a Chevy Bolt on a drag race in Moscow. [Credit: KindelTech/YouTube]
“Price is going to be what determines who is the market leader, and Tesla looks set to win on price for the foreseeable future,” Luke Gear, an analyst at IDTechEX, says.
Past the financials, Tesla’s growth, which is fueled by a strict and non-diversified focus on EVs only, gives the company an explicit advantage moving forward. On the other hand, GM has to combat the development of its 30 planned EVs with its existing fleet of gas-powered vehicles. Tesla can continue developing its EVs without any other distractions. Its name and reputation as the leader in the sector will help attract young and fresh engineering talent, especially in software and manufacturing, which are some of the company’s main focuses.
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GM’s goal is considerably lofty, and its words will not win over the Tesla faithful who are critical of the companies who talk a big game but fail to back it up. Many automakers have come along with a plan to disrupt Tesla’s domination in the EV sector, only to figure out that building an effective EV goes past putting a battery pack into a familiar chassis. But even if they don’t become the leader, will it be considered a complete failure?
“If they keep putting out tons of great products…and they take a ton of share from Tesla, are their EV efforts a failure then? I would say no,” David Whiston of Morningstar said.
What do you think? Leave a comment down below. Got a tip? Email us at tips@teslarati.com or reach out to me at joey@teslarati.com.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
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Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla Cybercab launch gets official date in Austin with dedicated event
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