There is a way to measure how much a company really believes in something: count how many times it mentions it in front of the people who give it money. By that measure, General Motors and Ford - the two largest American carmakers - no longer believe much in electric cars.

An analysis of quarterly investor calls over the past seven years, carried out with the New York research firm Hudson Labs, found that both companies now talk about electric vehicles less often than they did before the pandemic. Not slightly less often. At GM the number fell from 82 mentions on the second-quarter 2025 call to 21 on the latest one, covering the same quarter this year.

From "all electric" to "alignment with policy"

GM bet on mass-market electric cars before most of its rivals. It unveiled the Bolt at the Las Vegas show in January 2016 and had it on sale by the end of that year - six months before Tesla delivered the first Model 3s. By the end of 2020, each of the last two investor calls carried over 100 mentions of electric vehicles, roughly a third of the entire conversation.

The company that promised to sell only electric cars by 2035 now, when it mentions them at all, talks about having "aligned capacity and manufacturing footprint with changes in regulatory policy". That is a sentence written by someone who does not want to say what happened.

And what happened is fairly clear: the Trump administration scrapped the environmental regulations that favoured zero-emission vehicles, and his party deleted the federal 7,500-dollar tax credit for a new electric car. Demand did not vanish on its own - the ground was pulled out from under it.

Ford changed direction before the election

At Ford the decline started earlier. As far back as mid-2024, before the American election, the company was pulling out of some of its largest electric vehicle investments in favour of an internal project that later became its new platform. After Trump arrived, the conversation turned towards support for protectionist trade policy and towards the petrol F-series trucks, which bring in better margins.

Spokespeople for both companies say all of this is being misread. Jim Cain of GM says "quality matters more than quantity" and that the company remains consistent in its position that electric vehicles are the end goal, while call time is also needed for software, services, autonomous technology and trade policy. David Tovar of Ford points to the new platform launching next year: the first product, a mid-size pickup, will be exactly what the market wants on price and technology.

When the advertising falls silent

Both companies still sell electric cars and still have new models in the pipeline. GM is still the second-largest seller of electric vehicles in the US. But there is a difference between selling something and building the company's identity around it - and that difference is audible on investor calls long before it becomes visible in showrooms.

This is a useful reminder for anyone reading announcements about industrial transition. The billions were announced with conferences, stages and slogans; the retreat happens quietly, in sentences containing the word "alignment". The question that remains is not whether electric cars are coming - but how many of these promises survive a single change of government.