General Motors has booked nearly $11 billion in EV-related charges since mid-2024, and CFO Paul Jacobson says the next meaningful improvement in the company's electric-vehicle economics won't arrive until 2028.

Speaking at Morgan Stanley's 14th Annual Laguna Conference on Sept. 15, Jacobson told investors not to expect major EV headlines from GM next year. The leadership team under Chair and CEO Mary Barra — who has repeatedly framed EVs as GM's long-term "North Star" — has spent this year trimming production capacity to match demand and using cash flow to settle with EV suppliers. Jacobson said this summer that the $11 billion charge figure should not rise significantly from here.

"So '27, I think, is going to be a little bit of a sort of flat spot in the EV journey, depending on how much volume we pick up and might get some scale benefits, et cetera," Jacobson said. "We're really looking to '28 to start that step function improvement again and getting there. We still believe EVs are a long-term play for us, and we've got to get it right. We've got to get them profitable."

The battery bet

The anchor of the 2028 timeline is lithium manganese-rich battery production. GM developed the LMR cells with LG Energy Solution, and the two companies announced their partnership in May 2024. At the time, they said LMR technology delivers 33% higher energy density than top-tier lithium iron phosphate cells.

At Laguna, Jacobson framed the economics plainly: LMR offers "premium and power load at the same cost as LFP."

"So that will be a stark improvement — thousands of dollars per vehicle at the pack level for new EVs as we start to roll those out," he said.

GM ranks second in EV market share behind Tesla and has grown its share in recent quarters, closing June at about 13% of total sales. Even so, GM will still book a sizable EV loss this year — though Jacobson indicated it will run $1 billion to $1.5 billion below the 2025 figure. Narrowing that gap further depends on cheaper batteries and better production economics from 2028 onward.

Rivian's 2027 is anything but flat

A few hours after Jacobson spoke, Rivian founder, Chairman and CEO R.J. Scaringe took the same stage with a different 2027 outlook. Rivian began delivering the R2, a roughly $50,000 vehicle, to customers in June, and Scaringe said plans remain on track to launch a second shift at the Normal, Illinois, plant in the coming weeks.

The hurdle is not Rivian's own factory capacity or its ability to recruit and train workers, he said. It is the supplier base.

"Bringing a second shift on to then not be busy because you don't have parts is also a challenge," Scaringe said. "We want to coordinate that really tightly with the ramp-up of the supply chain. But that's been choreographed really nicely."

Analysts' consensus estimates put Rivian's R2 deliveries at 82,000 units next year — a big jump from the 65,000 to 70,000 combined units that Rivian executives expect to deliver this year across the R1, R2 and delivery van platforms. Scaringe did not commit to that number.

He did push back on the assumption that the R2's main rival is Tesla's Model Y. The target buyer, he argued, comes from the mainstream crossover segment.

"The opportunity is the vast majority of folks who aren't buying Model Y. So that's folks that are maybe in a Toyota RAV4 or 4Runner [or a] Ford Bronco or Honda CR-V or Audi Q5," Scaringe said. "It's the most popular segment in the United States and makes up about half the demand in the United States. […] That was the goal: To bring, call it, regular consumers in, not just early adopters, not just tech adopters."

Test drives and sales conversions are tracking well so far, he added.

If the R2 does break large numbers of internal-combustion buyers out of their habits next year, the effect would reach beyond Normal, Illinois. Converting mainstream crossover buyers — not early adopters — is the same demand pool GM needs to absorb its EV capacity and validate its 2028 targets.

What to watch: the second-shift launch at Normal in the coming weeks; GM's next EV charge disclosure, to test whether the $11 billion figure holds; and the start of LMR battery production with LG Energy Solution, the linchpin of GM's 2028 profitability timeline.