GM Stock Surges, Ford Left Behind

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 3, 7:10AM EDT

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GM Stock Surges, Ford Left Behind — © Bill Pugliano / Getty Images News via Getty Images

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General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM | GM Price Prediction) stock has risen more than shares of its automotive rivals.
GM has benefited from sluggish sales of electric vehicles across the industry.

Who would have guessed that America’s dominant seller of gasoline-powered cars would have the best stock performance against the country’s Big Three (which has to include Toyota now, because in some months its sales best Ford’s)? General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) stock is up 30% this year, while the S&P 500 is 16% higher. Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) is up by 12%, and Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) has risen only 6%.

Among the reasons for GM’s success is that electric vehicles (EVs) only accounted for 7% of cars sold last year. While EV sales have surged in recent years, that improvement has slowed considerably. Though GM has moved into the EV market, the success of its gasoline-powered cars has driven its sales.

GM noted its EV prowess when it released first-half sales numbers, but it said it had its best quarter in total unit sales since the fourth quarter of 2020. A close look shows that gasoline-powered pickups, the most popular vehicle segment in the United States, helped drive GM’s success. Sales of the Silverado LD hit 100,160, up 7.7%. That was against total GM sales of 696,086 for the first quarter 2024.

No matter how much auto experts say that EVs are the wave of the industry’s future, sales have slowed because people worry about EV prices, the number of charging stations, and the range of cars. The near-term future of the industry is still gasoline-powered engines, and GM continues to dominate that part of the market.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.