I’m a big believer in accountability and owning one’s mistakes. That’s why I was recently singing the praises of Ford CEO Jim Farley in a Deadline Detroit column about leadership. Farley made a colossal misjudgment betting on the American consumer’s appetite for electric vehicles. But unlike most corporate leaders, he fessed up and came clean.
Ford has taken roughly $19.5 billion in restructuring charges, largely tied to its EV investments. It has announced plans to replace the all-electric F-150 Lightning with an extended-range version, canceled plans to build electric pickups in Tennessee, and repurposed electric battery plants in Kentucky for stationary battery storage.
That is a lot of crow to eat in one sitting. But as one might expect from a CEO who for years has quietly volunteered at a Detroit homeless shelter, Farley showed the humility and grace to admit defeat. Readers can judge for themselves whether that matters, but it is increasingly rare in corporate America.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra, true to her longstanding well-worn obfuscation, has told Wall Street that she’s again focused on selling emissions-belching trucks and SUVs. Meanwhile, she recently named a San Francisco-based robotics and autonomy guru with no background overseeing legacy ICE platforms as GM’s product development chief.
GM has so far taken only a $1.6 billion write-down tied to its ambitious EV strategy. Given that GM’s electric truck models badly trail Ford’s Lightning, and given the broader slowdown in EV demand, it strains credulity to believe more write-downs are not coming. Even Pollyanna would hesitate to place that bet.
It is easy to blame Farley and Barra for their EV misjudgments, particularly given that each has received more than $100 million in compensation over the past five years. In professional sports, athletes making that kind of money are expected to perform at an elite level. When they don’t, they are benched or fired. The boards of Ford and GM appear to apply a far more forgiving standard.
Still, blaming Farley and Barra exclusively lets Wall Street off too easily.
American CEOs today are no longer masters of their corporate domains. They live and die by their stock prices. When Wall Street says jump, CEOs don’t ask why. They ask how high. And as recently as four years ago, electric vehicles were not just a product category. They were a Wall Street obsession.
Let’s revisit some of the EV prognostications some leading Wall Street analysts likely would prefer I didn’t mention.
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, whose media presence is so ubiquitous he sometimes seems to be running a dial-a-quote service, praised GM’s leadership ahead of the company’s 2021 investor meeting, arguing that Mary Barra’s “laser focus” on electric vehicles had given the company new energy and strategic direction. At the time, Ives rated GM an outperform stock and assigned it an $85 price target.
GM’s stock closed today at $82.18, still shy of the target Ives set more than four years ago, and that’s despite Barra having authorized roughly $25 billion in stock buybacks in the interim. Buybacks, once tightly restricted because of concerns they could be used to manipulate share prices, boost per-share results by reducing the number of shares outstanding. They do nothing to improve the fundamentals of a business, nor do they validate the strategy that supposedly justified the valuation in the first place.
Ives was hardly a choir of one.
UBS analyst Patrick Hummel raised his price target on GM in late 2020, explicitly tying the outlook to electric-vehicle momentum and strategic positioning.
“With a focus on crystallizing value of its EV strategy … GM will likely get more credit for being a relative winner in the transition,” Hummel wrote in a 2020 note, raising his target from $34 to $50 and saying the company was “fully back on track and likely enjoys strong momentum well into 2021.”
Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan echoed that optimism in April 2021, describing GM as a leader in autonomous, connected, and electric mobility. In the first quarter of that year, GM delivered just 9,025 electric vehicles in the U.S., most of them Chevy Bolts, still a fraction of the modest overall EV market at the time.
Wall Street analysts were equally gaga about Jim Farley.
Citigroup analyst Itay Michaeli raised Ford’s price target in late 2021, citing what he called “solid execution of its EV pivot,” a full-throated endorsement of Farley’s ambitions. Barclays analyst Brian Johnson upgraded Ford to overweight that same year based on optimism around its EV strategy and strategic tie-up with Volkswagen. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas described 2021 as “a breakthrough year strategically for Ford,” crediting the market’s embrace of the company’s EV commitment and new electric models. Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy upgraded Ford to outperform and raised his price target from $15 to $20 on the same theme.
Ford’s stock today closed at $13.80, a reminder of how much enthusiasm has faded since Wall Street was certain it had glimpsed the future.
One brave and defiant Wall Street outlier was investment manager Cathie Wood, who in November 2021 went out on a limb and said that GM and Ford did not have the DNA to succeed in the EV world. At the time, Wood was widely dismissed. In hindsight, her critique looks less ideological and more diagnostic. What GM and Ford lacked was not technology, but leadership and execution.
Farley and especially Barra have legions of apologists who argue they cannot be blamed for their EV failures because President Trump eliminated billions of taxpayer dollars that had been earmarked to support electric vehicles. Others argue that Farley and Barra had little choice but to aggressively pursue EVs in order to comply with the Biden administration’s ambitious emissions-reduction mandates.
That explanation does not hold up.
Toyota, second only to GM in U.S. auto sales, also had to comply with the Biden administration’s emissions rules. Yet Toyota’s former CEO, Akio Toyoda, refused to embrace EVs with the zeal of Farley and Barra. He argued that Americans were not yet ready to go all electric and that hybrids would provide a more realistic bridge. Events have largely proven him right.
Toyoda resigned as CEO rather than embark on a strategy he believed was mistaken. Farley and Barra chose a different path, and Wall Street cheered them on. To return to my sports analogy, their decisions were akin to an NFL coach calling plays designed to excite fans in the stands rather than win games on the field. Notably, several NFL coaches have been fired in recent days for performances far less dismal than Detroit’s EV misadventures.
It is also telling how quickly much of the media has forgotten President Biden’s “code red for humanity” warnings about climate change, which were repeatedly cited as the moral and economic justification for the EV push.
Multiple outlets have amplified GM’s talking point that it remained the top-selling automaker in the U.S. last year, delivering 2.85 million vehicles compared with Toyota’s 2.5 million. What is often omitted is that most of GM’s sales were gas-powered trucks and SUVs, while roughly half of Toyota’s sales were hybrids. Those hybrids, incidentally, were in short supply last year, putting Toyota at a marketing disadvantage.
Hybrids can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 20% to 30%, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. That means Toyota has made meaningful progress reducing emissions at scale. Meanwhile, GM CEO Mary “Zero Emissions” Barra, who was reportedly close to President Biden during his administration, has assured Wall Street she is once again focused on selling what environmentalists themselves describe as climate-destroying trucks and SUVs.
Ford, for its part, appears to be relearning the lesson. Ford’s hybrid sales rose 22% in 2025, and the company has said it plans to significantly expand its hybrid lineup. CarGurus predicts nearly one in six new vehicles sold this year will be a hybrid, as automakers green-light more and better offerings using the technology.
Barra, by contrast, bet almost exclusively on all-electric vehicles. Today, the only hybrid GM sells is the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray, a high-performance hybrid designed to enhance acceleration, not a mass-market vehicle intended to reduce emissions. Notably, years before Barra took the helm, GM introduced the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt in 2011, a vehicle that remains popular in my West Los Angeles neighborhood despite Barra discontinuing it in 2019.
Just before posting this commentary, I parked behind someone driving a 2013 Chevy Volt. She told me the car has been trouble-free for nearly 13 years.
Imagine that. A trouble-free GM vehicle still on the road after more than a decade.