GM Holds the US Sales Crown, But Toyota Is Closing Fast and Its EV Playbook Is Bleeding Volume

General Motors still leads US auto sales with 16.9% market share, but unit volumes are down 6.9% YoY and EV sales have cratered 32.6% in H1 2026. The financial picture tells a different story: adjusted EBIT is up 30%, the company is guiding for up to $16B in full-year EBIT, and a $23B buyback spree has vaporized 35% of its float since late 2023.

GM · Consumer Discretionary · September 06, 2026

S&P 500 Position

Within Consumer Discretionary, GM sits below Tesla (~$800B+) and above Ford (~$40B) in market cap. The auto manufacturer cohort in the S&P 500 is small — GM, Tesla, and Ford are the only pure-play US automakers. GM trades at a fraction of Tesla's valuation but generates substantially more revenue. The competitive dynamic is unusual: GM leads US unit sales but trails Tesla in EV share and market cap by an order of magnitude.

Index Weight: Data unavailable | Rank: Approximately #60-80 in the S&P 500 by market cap (~$79B)

Company Overview

GM is running two businesses simultaneously — a highly profitable ICE truck and SUV franchise in North America that generates the vast majority of its cash, and an EV portfolio built on the Ultium platform that is losing volume across nearly every nameplate. In H1 2026, GM sold 1.34 million vehicles in the US but only 56,679 were battery-electric, a 32.6% decline from the prior year. The Chevy Equinox EV, its highest-volume EV, dropped 41% to 16,249 units. The Blazer EV collapsed 75%. Only the newer Cadillac Optiq and Vistiq showed growth, from low bases. Ultium cell production has been cut back sharply. The strategic tension is obvious: GM is simultaneously lobbying Congress to permanently ban Chinese vehicles from the US (protecting its ICE moat) while spending billions on an EV transition whose consumer demand is decelerating. The competitive picture is tightening. Toyota closed to within 95,587 US units of GM through June, growing 1.4% while GM shrank 6.9%. Analysts are openly discussing whether Toyota overtakes GM as the top US seller by year-end — something that would end a streak stretching back to 1931 (with the exception of a brief 2021-era interruption). Globally, GM is fifth at 5.0% market share, behind Toyota (12.7%), Volkswagen (9.4%), Hyundai (8.5%), and Stellantis (6.4%). Chinese OEMs BYD and Geely are rapidly climbing the global table. Financially, however, GM is in its strongest position in years. Q2 2026 adjusted EBIT hit $3.9B (up 30% YoY), adjusted EBIT margin expanded to 8.2% from 6.4%, and the company raised full-year guidance to $14–16B in EBIT-adjusted. The share count is down 35% since late 2023 thanks to $23B in buybacks. The stock hit all-time highs around the Q2 report. GM is effectively harvesting its ICE dominance to fund the EV transition and return capital — a strategy that works until the ICE franchise erodes faster than the EV franchise scales.

Products & Revenue

GM's revenue is overwhelmingly North American. GMNA — spanning Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac across ICE and EV — accounts for over 83% of reportable segment revenue. GMI (International, primarily China, South America, and the Middle East) contributes under 8% and is currently undergoing restructuring, particularly the China JV operations. GM Financial, the captive finance arm, contributes roughly 9% of revenue and punches above its weight on profit, generating $605M in EBT-adjusted in Q2 2026 on $4.3B of revenue. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit, is effectively zero-revenue following its operational shutdown and has been folded into GM's internal autonomy development pipeline rather than operating as a standalone robotaxi service.

GMNA (GM North America) (83.4%): All vehicle sales and related revenue across Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Includes both ICE and Ultium-platform EVs. Q2 2026 revenue of $39.9B with $3.4B EBIT-adjusted.

GM Financial (8.9%): Captive auto finance subsidiary providing retail loans, leasing, dealer floorplan financing, and commercial lending. Q2 2026 revenue of $4.3B with $605M EBT-adjusted — the highest-margin segment by percentage.

GMI (GM International) (7.7%): Vehicle operations outside North America, primarily China JVs (SAIC-GM, SGMW), South America, and Middle East. Q2 2026 revenue of $3.7B with $190M EBIT-adjusted. China operations are being restructured amid intensifying local competition from BYD, Geely, and others.

Based on GM 10-Q filings for Q1 and Q2 2026 (SEC). Percentages reflect Q2 2026 reportable segment revenue totaling $47.87B. FY2025 annual breakdown from Bullfincher confirms similar proportions: GMNA 83.5%, GMI 7.3%, GM Financial 9.2%.

Leadership

Mary T. Barra

CEO since 2014. The first female CEO of a Big Three automaker, Barra has led GM for over twelve years, navigating the Ignition Switch crisis, the Cruise autonomous bet, and the Ultium EV platform buildout. She is a GM lifer — electrical engineering degree from Kettering University (formerly GMI), MBA from Stanford, and prior stints running global product development and global manufacturing. Her total compensation is $29.9M (93% in equity/bonuses), and she directly owns approximately $37M in GM shares.

Paul A. Jacobson, Executive Vice President and CFO: Former Delta Air Lines CFO, joined GM in 2020. Architects the aggressive capital return strategy — $23B in buybacks plus a 20% dividend hike in January 2026 — while managing $3–4B in tariff headwinds.

Grant Dixton, EVP, Chief Legal and Public Policy Officer: Joined from Activision Blizzard in 2024. Leading GM's push for permanent congressional legislation banning Chinese vehicles, software, and hardware from the US market — a regulatory strategy as important to GM's future as any product launch.

Arden Hoffman, EVP, Chief People Officer: Promoted from Cruise CPO in July 2026. Managing the workforce transformation as GM integrates AI into engineering workflows — the IT layoffs of May 2026 were the first visible output of this shift.

The AI Angle

90% AI-Generated Code Powers the Road to Eyes-Off Driving

GM's most striking AI deployment is internal: Mary Barra disclosed on the Q1 2026 earnings call that nearly 90% of the code written by GM's autonomy team is now AI-generated, applied to the next-generation Super Cruise system. This is not a marketing number — it's a direct CEO statement on an earnings call, and it reflects a fundamental restructuring of how GM builds its most strategically critical software. The May 2026 layoff of 500–600 IT employees, concentrated in Austin and Warren, was explicitly linked to AI tool adoption for programming and data science work. GM is not just using AI for products; it's using AI to reduce the human headcount required to build those products. On the product side, GM is pursuing a three-layer stack. At the consumer-facing layer, Google Gemini conversational AI replaced the legacy Google Assistant in 2026 vehicles, providing a more capable in-cabin voice interface. At the ADAS layer, Super Cruise has logged over one billion hands-free highway miles across roughly 750,000 vehicles and remains the most deployed hands-free highway driving system from a legacy OEM. The third layer — full autonomy — is where Cruise's driverless data feeds into GM's planned 'eyes-off, hands-off' system, scheduled for a 2028 debut on the Cadillac Escalade IQ. The infrastructure strategy is a hybrid build-buy approach. GM is building its own autonomy software (inheriting Cruise's perception and planning codebase) but buying compute silicon from Nvidia. The next-gen SDV (software-defined vehicle) architecture will run on Nvidia Drive Thor SoCs, replacing the current Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. This is a significant platform bet — Drive Thor is Nvidia's most powerful automotive SoC, designed to consolidate ADAS, infotainment, and instrument cluster workloads onto a single chip. GM's Ultifi software platform, which enables OTA updates across both ICE and EV vehicles, is the middleware layer connecting cloud services to the vehicle. The risk is execution timing. The 2028 eyes-off target puts GM behind Tesla's FSD (already deployed, though with regulatory caveats), behind Waymo's production robotaxi service, and potentially behind Hyundai and Mobileye partnerships. GM spent over $10B on Cruise before shuttering its external operations, and the reorganization into an internal autonomy team means the company is essentially starting its third attempt at deploying L4+ capabilities. The 90% AI-generated code statistic, while impressive, also raises quality assurance questions that GM has not publicly addressed.

Financial Snapshot

Revenue (TTM): $185.5B — TTM (trailing twelve months ending June 30, 2026) | Net Income: $1.9B net income (TTM, GAAP); adjusted EBIT of ~$7.1B in H1 2026 alone, with full-year guidance of $14–16B

Margins: Gross margin data unavailable from provided filings; adjusted EBIT margin improved to 8.2% in Q2 2026 from 6.4% YoY; GAAP net margin 1.0% (TTM, depressed by $2.5B in Q2 special charges for EV realignment and China restructuring)

The GAAP P/E of 39x is misleading — strip out the $2.5B in Q2 restructuring charges and the EV/China realignment costs, and GM is trading at roughly 6.8x its own midpoint adjusted EPS guidance of $13.00. Capital allocation is the headline story: $23B in buybacks since November 2023 have reduced the float by 35%, the dividend was raised 20% in January 2026, and the company guides for $9.5–11.5B in adjusted automotive free cash flow for 2026. GM is guiding for $3–4B in tariff headwinds, which it is absorbing while still raising EBIT guidance — a sign of the ICE franchise's pricing power.

1-Year Performance

$87.76 as of September 6, 2026. YoY performance data unavailable, but the stock hit all-time highs around the Q2 earnings report per Yahoo Finance reporting.

The all-time high was driven by the Q2 earnings beat ($3.57 adjusted EPS vs. ~$3.13 consensus), the raised full-year guidance, and the ongoing buyback program's mechanical support for the share price. The 35% reduction in share count since late 2023 has been the single largest driver of per-share value creation. Tariff uncertainty and EV volume declines are the bear case, but the market is clearly pricing GM on its ICE cash flows, not its EV growth trajectory.

Recent News

Fun Fact: When GM shut down Cruise's external robotaxi operations, it didn't scrap the data. Cruise had accumulated the most dense urban autonomous driving dataset of any company outside Waymo, including millions of miles in San Francisco, Phoenix, and other cities. That perception and mapping data now feeds directly into Super Cruise's evolution — making GM's $10B+ Cruise investment function as the world's most expensive training dataset acquisition. The 90% AI-generated code figure Barra cited on the Q1 2026 earnings call is being applied to the same codebase, meaning Cruise's human-written autonomy stack is being iteratively rewritten by AI systems trained partly on Cruise's own driving data — a recursive loop that would have been science fiction when Cruise was acquired in 2016 for $1 billion.