GM’s electric vehicles are finally making money — sort of

General Motors is still very much a company that runs on gasoline, but electric vehicles are increasingly becoming an important part of the mix. Today, the automaker released its fourth quarter earnings for 2024, and it revealed that for the first time, its EVs were making money. Sort of.

In a letter to shareholders, GM CEO Mary Barra described its EV business as “variable profit positive,” in which the revenues from its EVs exceeded the fixed costs of manufacturing the vehicles, including labor and building materials. It did not include costs such as building assembly lines, but it does show that GM is making progress on its EV business, Reuters says. That all doesn’t make GM’s EV division profitable, per se — but it’s certainly getting there.

GM has been promising a profitable EV business since at least 2022, when it predicted that it would be “solidly profitable” by 2025. Last year, Barra said the automaker would start making money on its EVs by the end of 2024. But today’s report suggests that there is still some work to do before GM can make good on its promise.

Among the highlights this quarter was an 85 percent increase in Chevy Equinox EV sales over the previous quarter, as well as the “best sales quarter ever” for the GMC Hummer EV.

The company did not break out its EV losses specifically, but it did say it produced about 189,000 electric vehicles in North America last year and hopes to produce about 300,000 in 2025.

EVs are generally unprofitable for every automaker not named Tesla, as the high costs of factory construction, battery manufacturing, and R&D tend to soak up any revenues that are brought in. And the outlook for future profitability isn’t looking great, with the Trump administration promising to eliminate EV incentives and enact wide-ranging tariffs on Mexico and Canada, where a lot of automakers (GM included) are heavily invested.

That said, GM said it has a plan for dealing with the tariffs when they come, according to the New York Times. And it said it already started delivering several new EVs, including the Cadillac Optiq and Escalade IQ, as well as the Cadillac Vistiq in early 2025.

“We’re targeting further improvements in EV profitability as we continue to scale,” Barra said. “Whatever happens on these fronts, we have a broad and deep portfolio of ICE vehicles and EVs that are both growing market share, and we’ll be agile and execute as efficiently as possible.”