General Motors sold 670,974 vehicles in the United States in the third quarter of 2026. That is down 5.5% on the same quarter last year — a soft number, not a crisis.
Inside it sits a different story. GM delivered 25,473 electric vehicles in the quarter. A year earlier it delivered 66,501. That is 41,028 fewer cars, a fall of 61.7%, and it takes EVs from 9.4% of GM's American volume down to 3.8%.
The company that spent most of the decade telling investors it would be all-electric by 2035 now sells fewer than four electric cars in every hundred it moves in its home market.
The Model-Level Numbers Are Worse Than the Average
A 61.7% decline is the blended figure. Underneath it, individual nameplates have simply stopped selling.
- Chevrolet Equinox EV — 1,905 units, against 25,085 a year ago. A fall of more than 92%. This was supposed to be the volume car, the affordable one, the proof that electric could be ordinary.
- Chevrolet Blazer EV — 1,261 units, down 84.4%
- GMC Hummer EV — 1,423 units, down 72.9%
- Chevrolet Silverado EV — 1,655 units, down 58.0%
- GMC Sierra EV — 1,661 units, down 50.8%
- Cadillac Lyriq — 3,617 units, roughly half of last year's figure
- Cadillac Vistiq — 2,587 units, down 34.1%
- Cadillac Escalade IQ/IQL — 1,604 units, down 29.2%
- Cadillac Optiq — 4,550 units, down only 6.9%
Read that list in order and the pattern is hard to miss. The cheaper the electric car, the harder it fell.
Cadillac Is Now Half of GM's EV Business
The four Cadillac electric SUVs together accounted for 12,358 units — close to half of everything electric GM sold in the quarter. The Optiq, the smallest and newest of them, was the single best-selling electric vehicle in the entire GM portfolio and the only one that held roughly flat.
That is an accidental strategy, not a chosen one. GM did not set out to become a company whose electric business is a luxury business. It set out to sell the Equinox EV at scale. What is left after the demand shock is the part of the market that was never buying on subsidy in the first place.
When the incentive goes, the buyers who were only ever buying the incentive go with it. What remains is the segment that was paying full price all along — and at GM, that segment wears a Cadillac badge.
The Policy Cliff, Not the Product
Both Carscoops and Electrek attribute the fall to the same thing: the $7,500 federal clean-vehicle tax credit ended at the close of September 2025. Q3 2026 is the fourth full quarter of the American EV market operating without it, and the first in which the year-ago comparison is itself a post-credit quarter only in part.
The year-to-date figures show how deep it runs. GM delivered 82,152 EVs in the first nine months of 2026 against 144,668 across the same months of 2025 — down 43.2%. The quarterly number is worse than the nine-month number, which means the trend is still deteriorating rather than finding a floor.
GM's own explanation, as reported, is narrower: "the much smaller EV market and discontinued vehicles." Both halves of that are true. Several of these nameplates are being wound down, which flatters the percentage declines. But a 92% fall on the Equinox EV is not a discontinuation artefact. That car is still on sale.
What GM Is Actually Doing About It
The product decisions already reflect the demand. Reuters reported, and Electrek carried, that GM will build roughly 75% fewer Chevrolet Bolt EVs than originally planned — about 35,000 units — before discontinuing the model in the first quarter of 2027. The Bolt returned to the price list and managed 3,866 units in the quarter. It is leaving again.
Meanwhile the parts of GM that are working are entirely conventional. Buick was the only brand up in the quarter, at 43,990 units and +7.9%. Chevrolet fell 4.6% and GMC 4.7% — both roughly in line with a softening market. Cadillac was down 30.0% overall, which is what happens when a third of your lineup is electric in a year the electric market halves.
GM North America president Duncan Aldred framed the quarter around trucks: "Our business is performing very well, the launch of our next-generation full-size pickup trucks is on track."
That is the tell. In a quarter where the electric business lost nearly two-thirds of its volume, the official line is about the next generation of full-size pickups.
Why It Matters
Three things follow from these numbers.
Capacity is now the problem, not demand forecasting. GM built plants, battery joint ventures and supply agreements sized for an EV market that the tax credit was underwriting. Those assets do not shrink when the subsidy does. Every quarter at 3.8% EV share makes the fixed-cost arithmetic on Ultium harder.
The affordable EV thesis has not been tested — it has been suspended. The Equinox EV did not fail on product. It sold 25,085 units in a single quarter when it was effectively $7,500 cheaper. The question of whether Americans will buy a mainstream electric crossover at an unsubsidised price is still open, and GM is now answering it in the worst possible conditions.
The gap between GM and Ford is narrower than either would like. Ford's electric sales fell around 80% over the same period. This is not a share-shift story where a rival is taking GM's electric buyers. The buyers left the category.
For a company whose electric volume is now smaller than a single quarter of Equinox EV sales from a year ago, the strategic question has changed. It is no longer how fast to go electric. It is how much electric capacity to carry through a market that has, for now, stopped growing.
