The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, writes a blog, Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
GM CEO Mary Barra interviewed this week in Detroit
General Motors disclosed in a late-2024 regulatory filing that it was facing litigation and other risks so severe that an adverse outcome could result in “significant” damages and even “interruptions of businesses.” It was a remarkable admission for a company already reeling from strategic whiplash. Yet the disclosure passed almost unnoticed, except by one veteran auto reporter, Phoebe Wall Howard.
That silence helps explain why GM CEO Mary Barra now speaks less like a corporate leader and more like a lawyer constructing a class-action defense in the wake of GM’s still-unfolding EV debacle.
On Monday, Barra told members of the Automotive Press Association that she has “no regrets” about GM’s electric-vehicle strategy, despite the company recording more than $7 billion in charges tied to abandoned EV plans and eliminating thousands of jobs because of a massive strategic misjudgment.
Same Decision
“Everything that we knew at that point in time we would have made the same decision,” Barra said, leaning on her familiar EV loyalty talking points. That’s the kind of statement one expects in litigation defense, not from an executive overseeing one of the most expensive strategic reversals in modern automotive history.
If there was any serious pushback to Barra’s claims, it did not appear in the coverage that followed. None of the reporting explained why GM committed to an all-electric future before it could profitably manufacture EVs, or why Toyota, long mocked for its EV restraint, correctly determined that American consumers were not ready to fully embrace electric vehicles.
It’s hard to imagine Japan’s auto writers asking Toyota’s leaders whether they have regrets about embracing hybrids, which are selling briskly, generating profits, and reducing emissions by as much as 30 percent. That Barra is paid roughly 80 percent more than Toyota’s CEO only makes her EV miscalculation more damning, a compensation disparity the auto press almost never notes when reporting on Barra.
Barra’s defenders will point to GM’s surging stock price as proof that her strategy has worked, even though part of that runup reflects the $25 billion in stock buybacks GM authorized over the past three years. A rising share price, however, does not negate a $7 billion EV write-down, thousands of lost jobs, or the decision to bury bad news in regulatory filings. Nor does it excuse a press corps that treats market approval as a substitute for scrutiny.
Barra also claimed that some GM gas-powered vehicles are more fuel-efficient than hybrids, a statement the Detroit Free Press reported without offering examples, perhaps because no one in the room pressed her for any. The claim was especially galling given that a climate-activist group ranked four GM vehicles, including the electric Hummer, among the 12 most environmentally harmful vehicles on the road. Toyota and its Lexus brand accounted for half of the greenest vehicles. GM did not place a single model on that list.
Toyota's Hybrids
Although Toyota’s fleet is already about 50 percent hybrid and Ford has announced a similar goal, Barra reportedly said GM is still “working on” its hybrid and plug-in strategy. That’s remarkable given that GM introduced the plug-in Chevy Volt in 2011, a pioneering vehicle that arrived well before the market was ready for it.
Bob Lutz
Developed under legendary GM executive Bob Lutz, the Volt was designed to drive primarily as an electric car, with a gasoline engine acting mainly as a generator once the battery was depleted. That architecture was novel at the time and gave early credibility to the idea that most daily driving could be electric years before charging infrastructure or consumer psychology caught up.
With about 40 miles of electric range, the Volt covered the daily commute for many Americans, allowing owners to go weeks or months without buying gas. In my West Los Angeles neighborhood, I see more Chevy Volts than any other GM vehicle, which makes sense given that every owner I’ve spoken with praises its reliability.
Barra killed the Volt in 2019 to focus on GM’s all-electric future. While she now insists EVs remain GM’s “North Star,” the company’s stock has surged largely because Barra has reassured Wall Street that GM will resume its focus selling highly profitable trucks and SUVs with enthusiasm.
CEO Jim Farley
One might have expected the auto media to arrive at Barra’s press conference prepared for tough questioning, especially after GM disclosed a $7.1 billion fourth-quarter loss tied largely to diminished EV and battery investments. Unlike Ford, which announced its $19.5 billion write-down in a separate release and whose CEO Jim Farley candidly acknowledged on Bloomberg Television that it “didn’t make sense to keep plowing billions into products that we knew would not make money,” GM disclosed its loss in a regulatory filing.
Available For Good News
Barra remains readily available to the media when GM has good news to share. When the company stumbles, she is far harder to find, a pattern that has gone largely unremarked upon despite how frequently those stumbles have occurred in recent years.
The pattern helps explain why the same auto press that failed to challenge Barra’s “no regrets” performance readily accepted the claim that the four floors GM has rented in Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s Detroit office tower constitute the company’s headquarters.
A careful reading of the coverage of the official opening only reinforced my skepticism that the office is largely window dressing meant to create the impression that GM still maintains a meaningful Detroit presence.
For starters, of roughly a dozen executive offices, only four are permanently assigned — to Barra, President Mark Reuss, CFO Paul Jacobson, and Chief Legal Officer Grant Dixton. I can find no confirmation that any of those executives will work from the Detroit office on a full-time basis and pay Detroit’s nonresident income tax.
GM has 16 corporate officers. That means 12 are not expected to spend enough time at “headquarters” to warrant an assigned office. That reality was absent from the media’s coverage.
Instead, GM’s senior leadership is scattered across the country. Sterling Anderson, who oversees product development, is based in the Bay Area, as is Lin-Hua Wu, who runs marketing and public relations. Chief People Officer Arden Hoffman lives in Montana and has conducted company calls from her ranch
Improve Collaboration?
Ed Nightingale, who oversees digital products and infrastructure, is based in Seattle. Zach Kirkman, GM’s recently appointed vice president of strategy and corporate development, is based in Austin.
Yet the claim that the Detroit office will improve collaboration was repeated by the auto press without scrutiny or context.
The contrast with GM’s West Coast priorities is hard to ignore. Barra attended the May 2024 opening of GM’s Mountain View Technical Center, where she declared, “This is going to be a very central hub for us.” Coverage of the Detroit office media tour, by contrast, made no mention of Barra’s presence.
At the Mountain View event, GM showcased executives it had recruited from Silicon Valley. One of them was Baris Cetinok, then vice president of product software and services, who proclaimed that “Detroit is the original Silicon Valley of the world.”
Cetinok left GM last November, one of four senior Silicon Valley-based executives whose tenures lasted two years or less.
Another speaker at the Mountain View opening was Marissa West, GM’s president of North America, who reiterated the company’s all-electric vision. West, a roughly 25-year GM veteran, left the company about eight months after being promoted to oversee North American operations.
Hudson’s Detroit reportedly cost $1.5 billion to develop. GM is occupying about 200,000 square feet — space that includes 14 conference rooms, 52 huddle rooms, 63 phone rooms, and three common areas. While Barra promotes GM as a technology company, its supposed headquarters is four floors of leased commercial office building space — a far cry from the kind of purpose-built environments associated with companies that actually operate like tech firms.
Ford's HQ
By contrast, Ford spent more than $1 billion on its new Dearborn headquarters, a 2.1-million-square-foot campus designed to accommodate 4,000 employees, with plans that will eventually place roughly 14,000 employees within a 15-minute walk.
Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford, CEO Jim Farley, and former CEO Jim Hackett attended the official opening. Ford also spent more than $500 million restoring Michigan Central Station, a civic project for which it did not seek naming rights.
GM, by contrast, was previously obligated to maintain 4,000 headquarters jobs in Detroit as part of the $3.5 billion it received in state incentives. Governor Gretchen Whitmer relieved GM of that obligation in exchange for the company building electric trucks and SUVs at Factory Zero.
Tellingly, GM will not disclose how many employees will work at Hudson’s Detroit or how many will pay Detroit’s nonresident income tax. Factory Zero, the facility GM cited in exchange for being relieved of its headquarters job obligations, has already seen 1,100 workers laid off as the company retrenches from its electric-vehicle ambitions.
Gilbert received substantial tax breaks for Hudson’s Detroit, justified in part by promises that the development would attract new companies and jobs to the city. Meanwhile, the Detroit Regional CEO Group has named Barra and Reuss as co-chairs, despite GM’s continued downsizing of its Michigan workforce.
A headquarters without disclosed staffing, without full-time executive presence, and without accountability to the city that subsidized it is not a headquarters in any meaningful sense. It is a carefully branded installation — and the willingness of the auto press to treat it otherwise says far more about the state of automotive journalism than it does about GM’s supposed commitment to Detroit.
Starkman can be reached at eric@starkmanapproved.com Anonymity assured and protected.
