GM's electric future just got way more future

General Motors stunned the auto world four years ago when it pledged to go all electric by 2035.
That goal quietly died this week when the company announced a $4 billion investment heavily skewed toward gasoline-powered vehicles, writes David Ferris.
The companies' EV target was always more on the aspirational side — and highly dependent on federal policies and market trends, analysts told David. 'It was always a long shot at best,' said auto analyst Sam Abuelsamid.
But the goal was emblematic of a burgeoning push toward phasing out gasoline-powered vehicles under former President Joe Biden, who made boosting electric cars and trucks a cornerstone of his climate agenda.
GM finds itself in a starkly different world under President Donald Trump, who has raced to dismantle federal tax EV credits, frozen grants for building charges to power them, and implemented high tariffs that make production more expensive. Not even Trump's once-close relationship to Tesla CEO Elon Musk blunted his attacks on EVs.
While GM isn't abandoning its electric vehicle portfolio — 'We still believe in an all-EV future,' a spokesperson told David — the auto giant's renewed investment in gasoline-powered cars and trucks means its all-electric future just got much further away.
'GM's doing a better job than many of their competitors, but there's obviously a relatively low ceiling because of the lack of supportive policy,' said Alan Baum, an independent Detroit auto analyst.
Earlier this week, GM trumpeted the fact that it sold 37,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter of the year, making it the No. 2 EV maker in the U.S. behind Tesla.
But the company has also announced new investments in gasoline-powered production, signaling it plans to make internal combustion engines well behind 2035. It is also a member of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which has vociferously opposed California's plans to require all-electric auto sales by 2035.
It's Thursday — thank you for tuning in to POLITICO's Power Switch. I'm your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to askibell@eenews.net.
Today in POLITICO Energy's podcast: Alex Guillén breaks down how the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rollback of a historic Biden-era climate rule for power plants will impact efforts to fight global warming.
Power Centers
Legal pitfalls in climate rule rollbackEPA's proposal to stop regulating power plant climate pollution is built around a bold claim that the industry emits too little heat-trapping pollution to be worth it, write Jean Chemnick, Niina H. Farah and Lesley Clark.
Legal experts say that rationale could create legal stumbling blocks.
House approves cuts packageThe House approved a $9.4 billion rescissions package Thursday, a White House priority that would claw back more than half a billion dollars for international disaster aid and clean energy programs, writes Andres Picon.
Among other cuts, the bill would repeal the country's entire $125 million contribution to the international Clean Technology Fund for fiscal 2025.
In Other News
Floodplain buyouts: As floods keep coming, this small city can't afford to let people leave.
Submarine warfare: Submarines are hard to detect. Climate change might make it even harder.
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The Trump administration is bailing on a climate summit in Bonn, Germany, that has long served as a stepping stone to broader international talks later in the year.
House Republicans are again pushing legislation to rewrite the Clean Air Act, but with a fresh argument: that changes are needed to keep up with the explosive demand for data centers.
California energy officials greenlit the country's largest solar and battery project ever via a new permitting process to streamline certain clean energy projects.
That's it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.

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Forbes

31 minutes ago

• Forbes

Safety Drivers, Remote Diving And Assist - The Long Tail Of Robotaxis

Remote driving room at Vay, where operators have video game consoles and multiple screens to control ... More cars on Las Vegas streets. With Tesla now planning to launch its pilot robotaxi service in Austin TX this week using safety drivers (Tesla employees in the passenger seat able to supervise and intervene) it's a good time to review the history of the safety driver and all the other technologies being used to help self-driving cars deal with the 'long tail' of problems they must solve to work on our roads. Making a car that can handle every possible road situation with perfect safety is a science fictional goal--nobody is close to knowing how to do it. As such, all robocars call on humans in one way or another, from tasks as simple as cleaning and recharging them to intervening when they make an unsafe move. I'll look at all approaches. Removing the safety driver is the 'big hard step' that changes a vehicle from a testing prototype to a real robotaxi. There are many other steps, but they are baby steps compared to the first time the vehicle goes out without a human overseeing it and able to take control. Safety Driver The very first robocars, which were pretty primitive and failed often, were set up so a human driver could sit in the driver's seat and grab the wheel or press the pedals at any time. That immediately disengaged the self-drive system and the car became manually driven. Many cars also had the 'big red button,' an emergency stop button to be used if grabbing the controls failed. It usually did a hard disconnect of all systems, but in practice most are never used. Outside of closed courses like the DARPA Grand Challenge, all robocar testing from day one has worked this way. All teams hope for the day they can remove that safety driver, as that is the whole goal. It generally works well. With properly behaving safety drivers, test robocars have very good safety records. Except for one giant black mark, when Uber ATG did not manage safety drivers well, and hired one who watched a TV show instead of doing her job, allowing the vehicle, when it failed (as prototypes are expected to do) to strike and kill a pedestrian. In the early years, cars typically had two staff in them, one behind the wheel, and the other, sometimes called the software operator, who monitored the driving soft ware to make sure it was doing the right things. Safety drivers can take the wheel at any time, and are told to do it if they feel anything odd is going on, or sometimes if a risky situation is likely. Especially in early years, if there were children on the street, you always took over. In addition, if the software detected any problems, it would alert the safety driver to take over. Teams (and governments) track interventions. The best teams take every significant intervention and create a simulation scenario to duplicate it, then test what would have happened if the human had not intervened. If the car would have done something bad, like hit something, that becomes a priority problem to fix. Indeed, interventions where it turns out the car would have done fine are often not even counted. Tesla took things to a new level when it released Autopilot and FSD. These had ordinary untrained customers act as supervisor for the vehicle. Google/Waymo had only used trained employees who took a driving safety course. When Tesla did this, there was great skepticism that relying on ordinary customers would be unsafe, but in reality, it worked out. Probably not as safe as ordinary driving, but fairly similar. (Tesla misleadingly claims it is much safer, but this is false.) Safety Driver not in Driver's Seat The normal place is behind the wheel, but some vehicles put a safety operator in another location, such as the passenger's seat. In vehicles designed with no controls (like some shuttles) the employee may have access to just an emergency stop button that commands the vehicle to stop and pull over, or slightly more involved controls. This may also include a video game controller, wheel or gamepad that can be plugged in for manual driving. This is probably not as safe as a person behind the wheel. In the passenger's seat, there is a ong history of human driving instructors training teen drivers by having their own brake pedal and the ability to grab the wheel. I remember my own driving instructor doing that. It works, though it's not clear if it has any purpose other than saying, 'nobody at the wheel.' It's more for PR than safety in vehicles that still have a wheel. Even so, some companies have done it. Russian robotaxi company Yandex used it in Austin and other cities. (Yandex is now non-Russian and called AVRide.) Cruise did their first 'driverless' test with an employee in the passenger seat. Most shuttle companies keep a worker in the shuttle who can hit the emergency stop, and pull out a game controller to drive. Remote Driving It may surprise some to learn there are remotely driven cars on the road today. German company Vay uses this to deliver cars to customers in Las Vegas. Several other companies have built different tools for remote driving. I worked (with compensation) with one such company, to produce a video about some of these approaches. Remote driving is done over public data networks, which of course face interruptions and packet loss and sometimes long latency. As such, it is typically done with a system capable of doing safe basic operations without remote input so that it will, at worst case, just come to a stop if comms get too bad. They are also usually designed to use multiple communications channels to survive problems with any one of them. Remote driving still requires paying a human, so you lose a lot of the cost advantage of a robocar over say, an Uber. However, you don't have to pay a human while the vehicle is sitting waiting. (Uber doesn't pay its drivers for that either, but it effectively builds into the fares for actual driving enough to make drivers tolerate the wait. They can also do other work or read or watch videos between rides.) As such, it can be cheaper to operate a remote driven fleet than a human driven one, and you can do WhistleCar service (car delivery) like Vay. Some companies, like Waymo, make use of low speed remote driving when they are in a situation where they want to move a stuck car or solve a problem the software can't. At these low speeds, you can't do much damage and you can stop on a dime if the connection has an issue. Some delivery robots, such as the early Kiwibot and Coco, were entirely remote driven, because at the speed of sidewalk delivery robots, that's fairy doable without safety concerns. (Indeed, many of these robots are so light that they don't hurt people even if they did hit them.) Tesla has advertised for programmers for some time to work on their remote driving and control systems for both robotaxis and the Optimus robot. Remote Supervision with Driving Remote supervision is effectively taking the safety driver and making them remote. The car mostly drives itself, but the remote supervisor is always watching (usually with an array of screens or possibly a VR headset) and 'grabs the wheel' virtually if they see the need to take over. You need to not need 'instant' takeovers that depend on sub-second reaction times (humans need about 0.7 seconds even when in the car) but is good for most problems which are apparent further in advance when you have the power of a human mind. This approach is not used by any team, at least publicly, though it has been speculated that Tesla is considering it. Remote Monitoring with Stop Most companies have the ability to connect to a car and watch what it's doing, even in full autonomous mode. Companies decline to comment on this, but all of them probably did this when they first dared to send the cars out with no safety driver. It seems like it would be foolish not to. Full time 1:1 remote monitoring doesn't scale very well, but it makes perfect sense in a pilot. In addition, these remote monitors probably have some ability to send a 'kill' command to the vehicle, to ask it to immediately stop and pull over, known as a 'minimum risk condition.' The difference between this and remote supervision is that these remote monitors can't do live steering, just hard stopping. Once stopped, however, they can usually switch into remote assist mode. Remote Assist All companies tend to have a remote assist operations room. There, operators are present who can help vehicles solve problems when they get confused. They usually cannot drive the vehicles directly, only give them strategic advice, like 'Turn around and take this new route' or 'Make the 2nd left' or 'Follow this set of waypoints to get around that obstacle' and most often 'Continue with your current plan, it's OK.' For remote assist to scale, you need to have many more vehicles on the road than remote assist operators, so that each vehicle on average needs active assist just a small fraction of the time. At Starship technologies, a delivery robot company, we set a goal of having 99% autonomy, meaning 100 robots for each operator. This makes the human labor cost effective. It's easier to do for delivery robots which can just stop and wait at any time. A leak from Cruise revealed robots were asking for help about every 5 minutes, which Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt felt was according to plan during their pilot stage. Over time the numbers would get better, but are never expected to get to zero. In most cases, according to Cruise, all the remote operator does is say, 'yes, continue with your plan A.' (In a typical remote assist, the vehicle sees a situation it is not fully sure of and offers multiple plans to the human remote operator, who picks one, or just allows plan A, or rarely crafts a new plan.) Sometimes remote operators will make human-like mistakes, which has been responsible for some strange incidents at Waymo, including one crash when the remote operator approved the vehicle going when it should not have. Some companies do have remote operators watching multiple cars at a time, which humans can do. While this may not scale long term, it's reasonably affordable today and wise during the pilot and growth stages of a robotaxi fleet. Waymo recently added the ability of remote operators to do low-speed remote drive to do things like move cars off the road, or out of trouble situations like blocked streets and emergency vehicles. Rescue Driver When all else fails, most teams can send humans in a car to rescue a vehicle by manually driving it, or in the worst case, towing it. For cars without controls, these teams will have a plug-in video game style controller. There are reports that some cars also have such a controller locked in a compartment that law enforcement can open so they can move cars without controls.

Yahoo

40 minutes ago

• Yahoo

Is Cathie Wood Actually Right About Tesla Stock?

Ark Invest's price targets on Tesla shouldn't be taken too literally and may prove overly optimistic (again), but they are based on sound arguments. Tesla has a history of overpromising and underdelivering on full self-driving. Tesla could still be a highly lucrative investment if its robotaxi business succeeds. These 10 stocks could mint the next wave of millionaires › Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has been one of the most vocal supporters of and investors in Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), and it's no secret in the investing world that Ark has a $2,600 price target on the stock for 2029. Still, what does that target mean, and does Ark's reasoning make sense? Here's the lowdown. The investment company's price target won't be "right," but then again, it's not supposed to be. It's an expected case scenario produced by a Monte Carlo simulation. In other words, Ark plugged numerous variables into an algorithm and ran a vast number of computer simulations to model a range of randomized outcomes. It's not necessary to get into the weeds about how these simulations are done; suffice it to say that on the bearish side, Ark's model shows a 25% chance that Tesla's stock price will be $2,000 or less in 2029, and on the bullish side, it finds a 25% chance that it will be $3,100 or more. Roughly in the middle lies Ark's expected value of $2,600 for the shares. The modeling itself is almost certainly wrong, simply because it relies on variables that are incredibly hard to predict. To illustrate just how challenging it can be to make accurate stock forecasts using this kind of simulation, let's revisit the predictions Ark made in 2021 and 2023 for Tesla's share prices in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Tesla's current stock price in 2025 is about $320. Tesla Price Targets Ark 2021 Forecast for 2025 Ark 2022 Forecast for 2026 Bear case $1,500 $2,900 Bull case $4,000 $5,800 Expected value $3,000 $4,600 Data source: Ark Invest presentations. Tesla's stock price is currently far below even the bearish scenario Ark simulated in 2021, and it would have to increase by 806% to hit the bear case scenario for 2026 that was projected in 2022. All of which is not to criticize Ark, because modeling the long-term value of a speculative growth stock like Tesla is incredibly difficult. The point is not to take the targets too literally. But if investors can't take such price targets as gospel, is there anything to be gleaned from Ark's analysis? As a matter of fact, there is. The key points from the model that investors can take away are the following: Tesla's share price is highly sensitive to the timing and scaling of its robotaxi and Full Self-Driving (FSD) capabilities. The $2,600 price target for 2029 assumes that at that point, 88% of Tesla's enterprise value (market cap plus net debt) will be attributable to its robotaxi business, and just 9% to its electric vehicle (EV) sales. The message is clear: Don't buy Tesla stock unless you believe there's a good chance its robotaxi service (which may already be operating in its first market by the time you read this) won't be successful. Everything is riding on the company's robotaxi bet. Tesla's unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) system is unproven, as is its robotaxi concept. Notably, it has yet to begin volume production of its dedicated robotaxi, the Cybercab. Moreover, there are myriad regulatory hurdles and safety concerns to overcome. Simply put, Tesla's robotaxi business is risky. And if it fails, it will likely set Tesla back significantly. Buyer beware. That said, while Tesla is a speculative growth stock -- remember, buyers at this point are investing primarily for its robotaxi business, not its electric vehicle business -- it's a growth stock with a difference. Tesla continues to dominate the EV market, and rivals such as Ford Motor Company and General Motors, have withdrawn from the robotaxi race. The auto industry as a whole has invested billions into the various efforts to develop a fully autonomous vehicle, and Tesla has not been alone in overpromising and underdelivering on it. Yet Tesla is launching its robotaxi service, and it has the vehicles, the data hoard, and the cash reserves to make it work. It's also ideally placed to start producing lower-cost EVs (which can be used as robotaxis controlled by unsupervised FSD systems), and the company says it's set to begin volume production of the Cybercab in 2026. Ark Invest is correct that the robotaxi business will be the key to Tesla's longer-term valuation and also the future of the auto industry. If -- and it's a big if -- Tesla can get the technology right, then there's significant upside for the stock, because all the other operational ingredients are in place for the company to make it work. That's where Wood and Ark might be right after all. Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you'll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a 'Double Down' stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you're worried you've already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it's too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you'd have $373,066!* Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you'd have $38,158!* Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you'd have $664,089!* Right now, we're issuing 'Double Down' alerts for three incredible companies, available when you join , and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Lee Samaha has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Is Cathie Wood Actually Right About Tesla Stock? was originally published by The Motley Fool

USA Today

an hour ago

• USA Today

Texas enacts robotaxi rules on the eve of Tesla's Austin rollout

AUSTIN - Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has signed legislation requiring a permit to operate self-driving vehicles just before Tesla's planned launch of a robotaxi trial on Sunday, June 22 in Austin, according to the governor's website. The law does not take effect until Sept. 1, but the governor's approval of it on Friday sends a strong signal that state officials from both parties want the driverless-vehicle industry to proceed cautiously. A group of Democratic state lawmakers earlier this week asked Tesla to delay its planned robotaxi trial because of the legislation. Neither Tesla nor the governor's office immediately responded to requests for comment. The law marks a reversal from the state's previous anti-regulation stance on autonomous vehicles. A 2017 Texas law specifically prohibited cities from regulating self-driving cars. In recent days, Tesla has sent invites to a select group of Tesla online influencers for a small and carefully monitored robotaxi trial, which the company has said would include 10 or 20 Model Y vehicles operated in a limited zone of Austin. The governor's signature on the law puts the automaker in the position of choosing whether to proceed with a rollout it might have to terminate before Sept. 1. The law requires autonomous-vehicle operators to get approval from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles before operating on public streets without a human driver. It also gives state authorities the power to revoke permits if they deem a driverless vehicle "endangers the public" and requires firms to provide information on how police and first responders can deal with their driverless vehicles in emergency situations. Musk pledges safe robotaxi rollout The planned Tesla robotaxi launch, which the company warned might be delayed, comes after more than a decade of CEO Elon Musk's unfulfilled promises to deliver self-driving Teslas. Most of Tesla's sky-high stock value now rests on its ability to deliver robotaxis and humanoid robots, according to many industry analysts. Tesla is by far the world's most valuable automaker. Musk has said Tesla would be "super paranoid" about safety for the Austin rollout. The company planned to operate only in areas it considered the safest and to have "safety monitors" riding in the front passenger seat. It is not clear how much control the monitors would have over the vehicles in an emergency situation. The service in Austin will have other restrictions as well. Tesla plans to avoid bad weather, difficult intersections, and will not carry anyone below the age of 18. Musk has said he is ready to delay the start for safety reasons, if needed. The planned launch has generated buzz among Tesla fans. "Wow. We are going to ride in driverless Teslas in just a few days. On public roads," posted Omar Qazi, an user with 635,200 followers who writes often about Tesla using the handle @WholeMarsBlog and received an invite. Commercializing autonomous vehicles has been risky and expensive. GM's Cruise was shut down after a fatal accident and regulators are closely watching Tesla and its rivals, Alphabet's Waymo, which runs a paid robotaxi service in several U.S. cities, and Amazon's Zoox. Tesla is also bucking the young industry's standard practice of relying on multiple technologies to read the road, using only cameras. That, says Musk, will be safe and much less expensive than lidar and radar systems added by rivals.