General Motors generates more than $180 billion in annual revenue, ranks No. 23 on the Fortune 500, and Mary Barra has run it for 12 years — longer than all but a handful of sitting Fortune 500 chief executives.
Most rivals scaled back their electric-vehicle commitments once Washington's incentives faded. Barra says GM's mission hasn't moved: "I think we still think EVs are the end game."
"Problems don't get smaller. When's the best time to solve a problem? The minute you know you have one."
She started at GM as an 18-year-old inspecting fenders and hoods on a factory floor, became CEO weeks after a recall crisis linked to more than 100 deaths, and rebuilt the company's safety culture from the ground up.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 44 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Mary Barra, Chairman and Chief Executive of General Motors
🎙️ Host: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer of Fortune
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on YouTube
🔴 YouTube | ⏱️ 44 min | ✅ Time saved: 28 min
Key Takeaways
GM sold more than 700,000 vehicles under $35,000 last year, and its own vehicle price increases have run below overall inflation
Incentives run one or two rungs below the rest of the industry, and GM is still gaining share
GM still calls EVs "the end game," even though the US timeline has stretched from 2035 to decades
She blames the regulatory shift and slow charging-infrastructure buildout, not customer demand
GM is, by her account, the only Western automaker both growing share and back in profit in China
She calls herself "a free trader if I have a level playing field," and says China hasn't offered one
Selling Opel to Peugeot's PSA was a "win win win" she says she has no regret about
GM is now exporting EVs back into Europe as that market stabilizes
She's betting personal autonomy, not robotaxis, is GM's autonomy business — after a very public wrong prediction
"I'm done making predictions" after she called self-driving cars for 2019
Eyes-off-the-road highway driving on the Cadillac Escalade IQ is coming in 2028
Winding down the Cruise robotaxi unit taught her GM's strength is personal vehicles, not fleets
"We don't run a bus fleet. We don't run a taxi fleet"
Software services like OnStar and Super Cruise carry meaningfully better margins than building cars
The show's own research put a typical software business's take at "about 70 cents for every dollar it earns"
General Motors self-reported the 2014 ignition-switch defect that triggered its own recall crisis
"One of the commitments I made is we'll do everything in our power to never let anything like this happen again"
GM Defense assembled its Army infantry squad vehicle largely from GM's own existing parts bin
The business is now working toward an MOU with Lockheed Martin and talks with other defense primes
She invested over $250 million in skilled-trades training over five years, following her own father's 39-year run as a GM die maker
Fortune's own reporting put the industry's unfilled skilled-trades gap as high as 2.1 million jobs
Warren Buffett told her never to run the company for the quarter
"I want you running it for the long term. That's how you're really going to create value"
The average Fortune 500 CEO tenure is about four years for women and seven for men — she's on year 12 and says she's not stepping back
1. Why GM's Numbers Hold Up
Shontell opened by asking what explains two strong 2026 quarters against tariff changes and a slower EV rollout.
Barra credited the team's agility, which she called "their superpower now," alongside a strong product lineup. GM's incentives run "usually one or two" rungs below the rest of the industry, she said, while GM keeps gaining share
She said predictions that US demand had peaked kept turning out wrong. "I look at the metrics every couple weeks, and we still see strength in the market from a vehicle perspective"
On affordability, she said vehicle prices have risen more slowly than overall inflation, and pointed to volume at the low end. "I think last year we sold over 700,000 vehicles that were under $35,000, and so I think it speaks to the affordability"
She cited the sub-$30,000 Chevrolet Trax, which she drove herself for a couple of months, as an example of keeping safety and technology features at a lower price point
Her framing for the whole portfolio borrows a line from Alfred Sloan: reaching "a lot of pocketbooks." GM sells everything from a full-size truck to a sub-$30,000 crossover to more than a dozen EVs, she said, so "wherever the customer is, we have a vehicle"
2. Why EVs Still Take Decades
Shontell noted GM's public EV target moved from "all in by 2035" to a transition Barra now expects to take decades, and asked what went wrong compared with China and Europe.
She traces the shift mainly to regulation, not to the product. "When you look at where all auto companies in the U.S. were a couple years ago, we were moving to a regulatory environment where you had to be making 40 to 50 percent of your EVs by 2030, or your vehicles had to be EVs by 2030"
Charging infrastructure has lagged despite federal funding, which she said slows customer confidence more than anything else. Permitting delays have held back projects tied to the infrastructure bill, though she said the number of chargers still rises every quarter
She argues car buyers are unusually rational because a vehicle is typically their first- or second-biggest purchase, and most households can't afford a car that doesn't cover every use case — a road trip, a college drop-off, a visit to aging parents — which is why charging confidence matters as much as sticker price
Asked how GM stays nimble across administrations with opposite EV agendas, she said the mission hasn't changed. "I think we still think EVs are the end game," she said, adding that President Trump has told her he wants to give customers choice rather than force an outcome
Her stated approach is building no-risk, no-regret moves ahead of policy shifts — on both the regulatory front and on tariffs — so GM isn't fully exposed if the political wind changes direction. "Unlike many others who have just really abandoned EVs, we're not," she said
3. China's EV Price War
Shontell raised BYD's rise and asked how long China's EV subsidies — enabling vehicles she said price near $15,000 — can hold, and how GM waits that out.
Barra said GM restructured its China business as the market shifted toward domestic EV makers, and now stands out among Western rivals there. "I think we're the only Western OEM that is growing share ever so slight, and also return to profitability"
China remains the largest EV market in the world despite being smaller than it was, which she said keeps it strategically important even as GM diversifies where it competes
She frames her trade position around a level playing field, which she says China hasn't given Western automakers. "I've often said I'm a free trader if I have a level playing field, and there really hasn't been a level playing field"
She said she sees US industrial policy — even where it echoes China's own support for its market — as broadly similar in kind, and credits it with helping keep the US auto industry strong while several established European automakers struggle
Her stated discipline regardless of policy: "we have to drive efficiency across the board," continually looking for ways to give customers more for less
4. Why She Sold Opel
Shontell asked how Barra decides which international markets to commit to versus exit, using Europe against China as the contrast.
She said selling GM's European operations, Opel, to Peugeot's parent PSA was the right call because GM was subscale there and Europe's regulatory environment was shifting hard. "We made the decision to sell our European operations to Peugeot at the time, PSA, and that was I think a really good decision for General Motors because at that time we were subscale"
She described the outcome as a three-way win. "We think selling Opel ended up being a win win win, a win for General Motors, a win for PSA because they got more scale, and a win for the Opel brand and the team there"
She said she has "no regret from making that decision," and GM already exports EVs into Europe today — with an eye to growing there again once the market stabilizes
5. Closing China's Tech Gap
Asked whether China's strength in robotics, batteries and chips worries her about US competitiveness long term, Barra pointed to a specific product win.
In China, she said GM's infotainment system was independently rated No. 1 after a rollout about a year ago, and is being extended across the portfolio to compete directly with domestic Chinese automakers
She said she believes American companies can keep pace if they invest and move at the same speed as competitors abroad, pointing to the number of robotics startups in the US as evidence of ongoing innovation capacity
Her closing line was a bet on the US, not a guarantee. "There's moments in time, but I bet on America continuing to lead in innovation"
6. Betting on Personal Autonomy
Shontell asked when a fully self-driving GM car becomes real for consumers, after noting Barra had ridden in a Waymo.
Barra opened by disowning her own earlier forecast. "I'm done making predictions," she said, after having predicted in 2019 that self-driving GM vehicles would be on the road by then
She said she still expects GM to lead, or come close to leading, personal autonomy specifically. "I believe from a personal autonomy, GM will be one of the leaders, if not the leader, from personal autonomy"
The next concrete milestone she named is eyes-off-the-road highway driving on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028, expanding from there across more conditions and more of the portfolio. "I'm excited that in 2028, that's when we've announced that we'll have our eyes off the road highway on the Escalade IQ, and then we'll just keep it expanding from there"
Super Cruise today is hands-off-the-wheel and feet-off-the-pedals, but still requires eyes on the road, on an expanding set of approved roads; the 2028 shift to eyes-off is, in her words, "the start of then getting to full autonomy"
Asked whether personal autonomous vehicles will even look like cars, she said the form will keep evolving the way vehicles already have over the last one or two decades, pointing to GM's advanced design team as already imagining that future
7. What Cruise Taught Her
The conversation turned to GM's acquisition of the robotaxi startup Cruise, which GM later wound down.
With what GM knew at the time, she said she'd make the same purchase again. "Well, I think with what we knew at the time, I would probably do make the same decision over again"
She said much of Cruise's capability and its people carried over into GM's personal-autonomy work, even after the fleet business itself was shut down
She traced the eventual decision to a question of core competency, not the technology itself. "We don't run a bus fleet. We don't run a taxi fleet, and so we started to look at what's our core competency," she said, distinguishing robotaxi autonomy from personal autonomy as genuinely different problems
She also noted GM was "a generation back on technology" at the time of the deal, meaning a large investment in time was always going to be required regardless of what was ultimately kept or cut
8. Software's Better Margins
The host noted that Super Cruise has now been driven more than a billion miles, and asked whether GM is becoming more of a software company.
Barra's answer was an unqualified yes — she pointed to OnStar and Super Cruise subscriptions as a new margin lever on top of vehicle sales. GM's low incentives already reflect demand for the vehicles themselves, she said, and services add "a whole nother dimension to grow at a different margin perspective"
The show's own research characterized the underlying economics: "A software business retains about 70 cents for every dollar it earns," against thinner hardware margins. Barra didn't dispute the premise
She credited hiring and internal talent for building out real product-management and release timelines for software, alongside the vehicles themselves. "It all comes down to talent, and we brought in some tremendous talent and built on the talent that we had in the company"
She said she's looking ahead to "Super Cruise Three and beyond" with eyes-off-the-road capability
9. AI On the Factory Floor
Barra was asked how AI and robotics have already changed GM, beyond the self-driving programs already discussed.
She said GM now has a tool that predicts a vehicle's aerodynamics from a digital sketch, without first building a physical model for the wind tunnel. "It's giving them a wonderful feedback tool that they can keep pushing and exploring because aero is so important," she said — aero affects both fuel economy and EV battery range, and she said the final design still goes into a physical wind tunnel today, though that may not always be necessary
On the plant floor, she described a skilled-trades worker using AI to speed up new-equipment startup. "I was just in one of our manufacturing plants last week, and they were showing me one of the skilled trades individuals was showing me how they're using AI to improve the speed of starting up new equipment faster"
She said she personally reviews a different area's AI use every other week, and that adoption has moved faster than she expected, from the plant floor to R&D
10. The Ignition Switch Legacy
Barra was asked to walk through taking over as CEO in 2014, weeks after GM recalled millions of vehicles over a faulty ignition switch linked to more than 100 deaths.
She said GM had identified the defect itself before the recall, and had already been defining a set of company values before the crisis hit. "One thing most people don't realize is General Motors actually figured out the problem, and we self-reported it"
Her small team worked the problem in short, frequent sessions while the rest of the company kept running the business, following three guiding principles: transparency, supporting the customer, and preventing a repeat
She singled out then-head of product development Mark Reuss for redesigning how GM validates vehicles, as systems shifted from mostly mechanical to mostly electronically controlled
An external investigation led to departures at multiple levels of leadership. She frames accountability through an engineer's obligation to understand their own work: "If there's something's going on with my part that I'm responsible for designing, and I don't understand, I shouldn't be sleeping at night"
The commitment she still repeats: "we'll do everything in our power to never let anything like this happen again." GM built a "speak up for safety" reporting process and an annual safety week, and every meeting still opens with a safety message — a practice aimed partly at employees who joined after the crisis and have no memory of it
11. GM's New Defense Business
Barra explained GM Defense and its infantry squad vehicle, developed for the US Army and now generating what the host put at about $700 million in revenue.
She said the vehicle was largely assembled from GM's existing parts bin rather than built from a blank-sheet spec. "We were able to say, oh, this is the vehicle you want. Okay, we're going to use a mid-sized truck frame, and we could go into literally the parts bin of General Motors and put the vehicle together"
That approach cut cost and development time, and she said the vehicle met or exceeded the Army's own performance requirements in some cases, with GM's existing global service network as an added advantage
She drew a direct line to GM's pandemic-era manufacturing surge. "You saw it during COVID when we made 30,000 ventilators, and that first one rolled off the line in 30 days," she said, framing GM Defense as another way to apply that scaling ability
The business now extends to allies as well as the US, and GM is pursuing further defense work: "That's why I'm excited about the MOU that we have with Lockheed Martin and the conversations we're having with some of the other big defense primes"
12. The Skilled Trades Gap
Shontell raised Fortune's own reporting on a projected skilled-trades shortfall — an op-ed from Ruth Porat and a Ford executive putting the gap as high as 2.1 million unfilled jobs — and asked how GM addresses it.
Barra said GM invested more than $250 million in skilled-trades training over the last five years, on top of hands-on training programs run internally, and said she'll keep working with outside groups on the issue
The story is personal for her: her father was a GM die maker for 39 years, retiring the year she started. "My dad was a die maker, so my dad was a skilled tradesperson for 39 years at General Motors, and he retired right as I was starting"
She said Europe treats skilled trades with more respect than the US does, and argued the pay case is already strong. "A dealer technician can be making 80s, 90s, and potentially even higher, depending on how many hours they work, so these are good-paying jobs" — and she pointed to rising demand for electricians tied partly to data-center construction
She said skilled trades may prove "a little more AI-proof than some others," and called it a message worth making to high schoolers directly
Asked whether she'd steer her own two adult children into the trades, she said she encourages whatever they're passionate about. A nephew is pursuing a trade with her encouragement; her own son and daughter, children of two engineer parents, went into engineering and business respectively. "I've encouraged my kids of, like my mother did, of do what you want to do, but be passionate about it and work really hard"
13. Buffett, Then Staying On
Shontell asked about Warren Buffett's early and public support for Barra as CEO, and then about her own plans to stay.
Berkshire Hathaway bought GM shares as Barra was working through the ignition-switch crisis, and Buffett became an early supporter after a board member arranged an introduction. She still saw him a couple of years ago, before he began limiting his meetings
His advice that stuck: don't manage for the quarter. She recalled him asking whether she'd do anything differently as a private company that didn't report quarterly earnings, and answering no. "He's like, great, because he said I don't want you running the company for the quarter. I want you running it for the long term. That's how you're really going to create value"
Asked her tip for C-suite longevity — Shontell noted average Fortune 500 CEO tenure runs about four years for women and roughly seven for men, against Barra's 12 — she pointed to building an empowered, inclusive team. "I mean, I understand there's times I have to make the call, but I really want to hear different perspectives because our business is so complex"
Asked whether, like Apple's Tim Cook, she'd consider stepping back for AI-era leadership, she said she has "so much respect for Tim and for John," but that she still feels she has more to give and remains energized daily — while noting any succession decision ultimately belongs to the board
Bonus Insights
Barra said she rarely comments on markets she's exited, but described Europe as a future opportunity for GM again as the region's EV market stabilizes, separate from the China discussion
She said GM's AI reviews now run from the plant floor to R&D, and specifically cited aerodynamic simulation and equipment-startup speed as two areas that exceeded her own expectations for how fast the technology has been adopted internally
Twelve years after taking over a company in crisis, Barra's bet is that the same discipline — no-regret moves, self-reported problems, a workforce given the tools to speak up — is what lets GM hold share in gas trucks, EVs, software subscriptions and now defense vehicles all at once, rather than picking one lane and hoping the market cooperates.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Super Cruise and OnStar (GM's subscription driver-assist and telematics services, which Barra said carry better margins than building the vehicle itself; Super Cruise has passed a billion miles driven and is due to add eyes-off-the-road highway driving by 2028)
Cruise (The robotaxi startup GM acquired and later wound down; Barra says she'd make the same purchase again given what GM knew at the time, and much of its technology and team carried into GM's personal-autonomy work)
BYD (The Chinese EV maker whose subsidized pricing, Barra says, has left China without "a level playing field" for Western automakers)
Opel and Peugeot (GM sold its European Opel business to Peugeot's parent PSA; Barra calls the sale a "win win win" she has no regret about)
GM Defense and Lockheed Martin (GM's defense unit built the Army's infantry squad vehicle largely from GM's own parts bin; GM is pursuing an MOU with Lockheed Martin and talks with other defense primes)
Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett's company bought GM shares as Barra took over during the ignition-switch crisis; his advice not to manage for the quarter stuck with her)
Cadillac Escalade IQ (The vehicle GM has named for eyes-off-the-road highway driving starting in 2028)
Chevrolet Trax (A sub-$30,000 model Barra drove herself, cited as an example of keeping safety and technology features affordable)
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