General motors

Friday

January 23, 2026

The drive toward electric cars has been a disaster

Just two years ago, Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, declared: “We believe in an all-electric future.” She went on to claim that the challenges her company was facing in the EV market were merely temporary bumps on the road to net zero. But as Bob Dylan famously observed, things have changed. On January 8, GM announced it would take a $7.1 billion hit in charges against its earnings, of which $6 billion is due to Barra’s failed EV strategy. In a filing with the SEC, the company also warned that it would take more write-downs this year as part of a “strategic realignment of EV capacity.” The car companies made 5.4 million EVs in three years – and incurred an astonishing $20,887 loss on each one GM’s move came less than a month after Ford Motor Co.

Thursday

April 16, 2020

Spectator Editorial

After the lockdown, the breakdown

We are told that ‘we’re in this together’ by people who can afford to wait out the epidemic in the way the aristocrats of old retreated to their estates when the plague arrived in the city. It is more accurate to say that we are, as this edition’s cover puts it, ‘together, alone’. The coronavirus has revealed that people today can live in ‘connected solitude’, as Sam Leith describes. It has never been easier to retreat from society if you have the money. But it has never been more vital to sustain real-world connections. We may feel atomized but the truth is we can no more insulate ourselves entirely from other people than we can from the economic effects of an unprecedented shutdown.