General Motors And Other Car Makers Have Big EV Goals. Why The Numbers Make No Sense.
By Al Root
Fri, Feb 5, 2021 5:40am
4 min
4 min
General Motors shook up the car industry this past week, saying it is aiming to stop selling gasoline-powered cars by 2035, much sooner than many on Wall Street would have predicted.
It is a sign that analysts and investors should be sharpening their pencils to figure out what is likely—and what is possible—for global electric-vehicle demand. The results of that number crunching will help to show whether the market has valued highflying EV stocks correctly and which, if any, still offer good value.
It isn’t an easy equation to solve. Auto makers express their goals—one indication of what might happen in the market—in different ways.
General Motors (ticker: GM) has its target for 2035. Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has talked about selling 20 million EVs by 2030 and plans to increase its production volume at 50% a year for the foreseeable future.
Volkswagen (VOW. Germany) wants up to 25% of vehicle sales to come from battery-powered electric vehicles by 2030. And Toyota (TM) plans to sell 5.5 million electrified vehicles by 2030—a figure that includes hybrid electric cars as well as fuel-cell vehicles.
Barron’s added up the numbers in the publicly announced goals, aligning them by year and filling in some gaps. We calculate that, based on company comments, somewhere between 15 million and 20 million EVs will be sold a year by 2025. That implies an average annual growth rate of about 50% between last year and then. With that growth, EVs would account for roughly 15% to 20% of total light-vehicle sales.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives qualifies as an electric-vehicle bull, but his estimate of EVs’ share of the market isn’t that high. “I am laser-focused on the skyrocketing EV demand out of China, Biden green initiatives, and [battery innovation] across the EV supply chain,” he tells Barron’s. “It looks like a golden age for EVs.”
Still, he is assuming EVs will win about 10% of the global market by 2025.
Focusing on China is a good idea. It’s the largest new-car market in the world and government incentives make buying an EV a “no brainer” for most consumers, according to Ives. Goldman Sachs analyst Fei Fang has predicted EVs will have 20% of the Chinese market by 2025.
RBC analyst Joseph Spak recently projected battery- and hybrid-electric vehicles could account for roughly 15% of new-car sales by 2025. That call was made back in December, before GM announced its aspiration to be all-electric by 2035.
Now Spak believes his projection could be too low. He did his own math to illustrate why.
“GM historically has had [about] 17% total U.S. market share,” he wrote in a recent research note. In December, he expected EVs to account for 40% of U.S. new-car sales by 2035. But for GM to go all-electric by then, assuming it keeps its historic 17% of the market, it would have to win 43% of U.S. EV sales, he said.
“The other way to interpret this [math] is that there could be upside to our 40% [battery electric] mix assumption,” added the analyst. That would be bullish for EV stocks, but he has a word of caution too. “A massive ramp in battery supply is needed to support this,” he said.
That gets at another important point for investors. There are many tertiary effects from faster EV penetration.
For one, as EVs take a bigger share of the market, they will start to get more of the capital the industry is willing to spend on product development. GM, for instance, is spending about half its capital over the next few years on EV and autonomous-driving technologies. By 2030, cars powered by internal combustion engines—ICE cars, in industry jargon—won’t look as attractive, relatively speaking, as those programs are drained of resources.
Electricity infrastructure is another critical issue. Right now oil and the refining industry essentially power cars. In the future, utilities and the electric grid will bear the burden.
The math needed to predict global electricity demand is harder, but higher EV penetration in 2025 would probably boost growth, now at roughly 3% a year, by a couple of percentage points. That seems manageable, but it means more investment in utilities.
The other side off the electricity equation is oil. Oil demand could fall slightly compared with 2019, a pre-pandemic year, if the world’s pool of EVs grows faster than expected. There are roughly 2 billion light vehicles on the road and nearly all take gasoline.
The next step in this math class is to value the EV sector. That isn’t easy either.
Given the growth and accelerating penetration, figures for 2025, when EV companies should be making real money, seem like a reasonable place to start. Apple (AAPL), the world’s most valuable company, trades for about 19 times estimated 2025 cash flow of about $120 billion.
Tesla is trading for about 65 times estimated 2025 cash flows. That is triple the figure for Apple, although if Musk’s goals are met, Tesla’s annual sales will go from more than 4 million vehicles to about 20 million over the next five years—between 2025 and 2030.
China’s NIO (NIO) is another highly valued EV stock. Analysts haven’t made public projections for its 2025 financials. But its shares trade for about 30 times estimated 2024 cash flow. According to analysts, NIO vehicle shipments are expected to go from roughly 345,000 to about 800,00 from 2025 to 2030. That is less growth than Tesla is looking to produce, but it still implies sales would more than double.
The 2025 valuation math can’t tell investors to buy or sell the stock, or the sector, but it does offer context about the coming golden age of EVs. Tesla stock is up about 21% year to date. NIO shares are up almost 19%. The S&P 500 is up about 2%.
Investors expect a lot. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas pointed out that January EV sales in the U.S. were still less than 3% of the total, but he isn’t an EV bear. He rates Tesla stock at Buy and has a target of $880 for the stock-price target.
The ICE Age is ending. If the switch to EVs is rapid, valuations for manufacturers might not be unreasonable. The effects on other industries are just starting to be felt.
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In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.
By SAM SCHUBE & CHAVIE LIEBER
Thu, Jan 22, 2026 3 min
3 min
David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.
After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.
“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”
Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.
He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”
“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.
Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.
Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.
In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.
Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.
“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.
Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.
In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)
“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.
Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.
Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”
He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”
Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.
He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.
Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.
But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.
“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.
“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”
