General Motors is the first of the Detroit automakers to release its full-year financial results, and some interesting details came out from them. One that stood out to us was the enormous cost of tariffs, a cost that we would think would have the company and its executives sounding more dour during the earnings call. Instead, they sounded almost... happy.
The reason for the company's seemingly positive attitude: it actually had a pretty great year in most other areas, and it ended up having earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of nearly $13 billion.
Tariffs Were Bad, But They Could've Been Worse
GM knew it would be paying a lot of money in tariffs for 2025, and it certainly did. The total for the year came to $3.1 billion, which is close to 25% of the company's earnings. GM had predicted, however, tariff costs between $3.5 billion and $4.0 billion, so the end result was actually better than expected. Not only that, GM says it was able to "mitigate" or "offset" 40% of those costs. Tariffs will be an ongoing factor for the company, though. For the coming year, it's expecting to again spend $3 billion to $4 billion in tariffs.
Earnings Were Great, And Things Could Get Better
As we already alluded to, GM made $12.7 billion before interest and taxes, and that fell right inline with its expectations of between $12 billion and $13 billion. The company is anticipating a far better 2026. It's estimating between $13 billion and $15 billion, so clearly GM thinks it's in a pretty healthy position. Of course, like any prediction, it's not infallible, and something could happen that could totally derail the company's trajectory, either from within or without, and few things about the world have been especially predictable over the last few years.
Those Earnings Were Supported By Strong Sales
Car companies live and die on their vehicle sales, and GM was definitely living in 2025. Total sales across all its brands in North America came to 2.853 million units, an increase of 5.5% and about 150,000 units over 2024. Chevy, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC all improved over 2024, too, so all the brands were contributing. Of the four, Cadillac saw the biggest improvement by percentage at 8.3%, and GMC had the smallest at 4.7%.
GM revealed some other interesting aspects of its sales for the year. Apparently, nearly 700,000 of their sales were of Chevy and Buick models for less than $30,000. So affordable models made up nearly a quarter of the company's sales. One of those models, the Chevy Trax, had an especially good year with around 206,000 units, becoming Chevy's third-best seller behind the Equinox and light-duty Silverado.
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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.
