“We really look at each customer, each segment. The willingness to do that is a little bit different,” he said. “We’ve got to remain the automaker who reduces friction for buying an EV product of our own, whether it’s through price, package, design, usability, range — all of those things.”
GM next year will roll out more nameplates on its proprietary Ultium battery platform to fill the nearly $90,000 price gap between the Chevrolet Bolt EV built on GM’s older battery architecture and the GMC Hummer EV pickup, which costs $112,595 including shipping for the inaugural version.
CEO Mary Barra told investors this month to pay attention to the Cadillac Lyriq midsize crossover, already on sale, and the forthcoming Chevy Equinox, Blazer and Silverado and GMC Sierra EVs as “core and critical to our EV growth strategy through 2025.”
GM’s job is to offer “really good vehicles at appropriate segment pricing that doesn’t cost anybody any more money than what they were paying to go into an ICE segment,” Reuss said. “It’s our job to deliver the commercial value, to be able to do that at margins that were similar — or in some cases above — what we did on an ICE vehicle. … Being opportunistic or episodic with pricing is not what we’re doing here. We’re in the long game, and we’re going to create customers for life.”
The automaker also will keep an eye on reservations to avoid having to raise prices on consumers waiting in line, executives said. GM only collected reservations for one model year of the Cadillac Lyriq, even though demand existed for more, because the automaker couldn’t predict the cost to build a 2024 model year vehicle, CFO Paul Jacobson told investors.
