Oct. 27, 2025 | EV sales to plunge in October; GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson

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Welcome to Daily Drive.

For Monday, October 27th, 2025, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, EV sales are likely to plunge more than 40% in October.

U.S. assembly plants could be just weeks away from shutdowns due to the Nexperia chip crisis.

And destination fees surge amid rising costs.

Plus, GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson talks about the automaker's ambitious tech goals,

including eyes-off driving in personal vehicles in 2028.

There are all these little things happening behind the scenes

where the innovations we're making will improve your life, your experience with our cars

in ways that will just feel like a better life, but you don't know why.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

New electric vehicle deliveries are likely to fall 43% in October from a year earlier.

Following the termination of the federal EV tax credit in the U.S.

That's according to a forecast from J.D. Power, citing early data.

The research firm projected EV retail sales at about 54,600 in October.

It estimated October EV share of the light vehicle market at 5.2%,

compared with 8.5% a year earlier.

EV share surged to almost 13% in September because of last-minute buying.

U.S. auto plants are just two to four weeks away

from disruptions due to the Nexperia chip crisis.

That's according to MEMA, the largest auto supplier association in the U.S.

Europe's auto industry is already working around the clock to prevent

the conflict from triggering production outages.

Nexperia has notified its Japanese automotive customers

that it may no longer be able to guarantee deliveries.

And automakers are upping destination charges on vehicles as costs soar.

Within the past year, Chevrolet, Ford, and Ram have upped the destination charge

on their flagship half-ton pickups from about $2,000 to $2,600 today.

A decade ago, all three brands charged buyers

less than half as much to ship those trucks from the factory to the dealership.

According to Edmunds, destination fees on vehicles priced under $150,000

rose 8.5% in the 2025 model year.

That's the biggest year-over-year jump in its data going back 10 years.

And those are today's headlines.

You can find more details on all those stories at autonews.com.

Here to talk more about that story on rising destination fees is Lindsay VanHulley,

who is covering the story for us at Automotive News.

Lindsay, welcome back to Daily Drive.

Hi, Kel.

So, Lindsay, how much do tariffs have to do with these destination price hikes?

It's hard to say. It's possibly not zero.

Analysts I talked to said it's likely that they're beginning to show up.

You know, it's interesting.

The story came up, at least initially, as we were reporting a couple of weeks ago

on just how tariff costs were going to ultimately impact vehicle pricing.

A lot of what we've seen so far is that these really big,

predicted MSRP increases really haven't materialized the way that

people anticipated earlier this year.

You know, at some point, you know, the question becomes,

how long are automakers going to absorb that at the bottom line?

And how much are they going to have to start passing on to consumers?

And at the time, I'd been, you know, kind of looking at price increases

and was noticing some destination fee increases on some GM vehicles from 25 to 26.

And, you know, it kind of got us thinking about, you know,

are we beginning to see it across the industry, you know, beyond just one automaker?

And we had had admins do some data analysis for us a few years ago,

kind of looking at, I think it was 2017 to 2021,

and kind of what the increase looks like.

And asked them to do a similar analysis.

And the increase over that period was higher than it was

the first time that they ran it for us.

And so talking with analysts, you know, trying to get a sense of what's really behind it.

It's difficult to say for any certainty, because, you know,

brands generally don't really break out all of the expenses that go into the destination charge.

It's, you know, in general, it's sort of the same whether,

you know, the dealership is across the street from the factory or across the country.

But in general, they pointed to higher transportation costs generally,

you know, the same kind of inflationary pressure that we've seen in the broader economy.

There's some mixed preference to, you know, customers are preferring larger,

heavier vehicles, and that becomes, you know, costlier to ship.

But we also know that, you know, there are now import tariffs on vehicles.

And so that is making the cost of shipping vehicles and importing vehicles more expensive.

And so analysts say it's likely.

I mean, it's hard to say with any certainty, but that it's likely that

some of those tariff costs are beginning to flow into destination charges.

And what are automakers saying about this?

They don't necessarily comment on the tariff piece in particular.

You know, they don't break out what goes into there.

But in general, they're talking about, you know, trying to stay competitive.

You know, GM, in a statement said, you know, that their costs reflect the cost

of shipping vehicles from factories to dealer showrooms.

We review these charges periodically and adjust as needed

to keep in line with the overall industry.

You know, Stellantis said something similar, you know, that their destination fees are

competitive with other automakers that sell large, full-size trucks and SUVs.

They are talking about, you know, trying to adjust as needed and then to stay competitive.

I think that's what they're ultimately, you know, trying to achieve so that they're not

any less competitive than any other automaker that sells in their segment.

Perfect.

Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks, Kel.

Lindsay's piece is titled Destination Fee Surge as Rising Costs Creep onto Window Stickers.

You can find that on the front page of this week's print edition

of Automotive News and over at AutoNews.com.

Coming up, we'll hear part of Lindsay's conversation with GM's chief product officer,

Sterling Anderson, about the automakers' big tech ambitions.

That's next on Daily Drive.

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Welcome back to Daily Drive.

I'm Kellan Walker.

GM says it will offer eyes-off driving in personal vehicles in 2028.

That's just one part of its ambitious tech plans in the coming years,

which it announced in New York last week.

Our own Lindsey Van Hulley caught up with GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson

just after the announcement.

Here's a piece of their conversation on the Automotive News Shift podcast.

So, you know, at a high level, talk through, I think, just the technology strategy that

GM outlined today and really what that's going to unlock and enable for the company going forward.

Sure.

Today we talked about where we're going with the future of GM's product portfolio.

And in particular, we focused on some innovations we're making to make the vehicle

both more and more effective part of your life.

One that removes sources of friction you probably didn't even know you had.

This is across our AI companion, our AI system work.

It's across some of the foundational pieces that enable it.

We talked about an electrical vehicle architecture that we are rolling out that

centralizes the computing across the vehicle and introduces much higher computational ceiling

or headroom for the software that we can roll out over time.

And what effectively that will mean for you practically in your life

is your car will get better as the longer you want it.

It will be enabled to do things that it couldn't do the day you bought it.

We also talked a little bit about what we're doing on top of that electrical architecture

to deploy an even greater degree of capability that effectively

turns your car into a robot in certain ways.

One that can ferry you on highways without you having to actively participate in the driving task.

And so that's around the evolution of supercruise and what we're doing there.

We also talked about some of the foundational work we're doing in electric vehicles

around a new chemistry called lithium manganese rich

that breaks off of the Pareto that the industry has been on for many, many years.

Where innovation in battery cell chemistry typically involves trade-offs.

An inherent trade-off between the energy density of that cell and its cost.

LMR gets off of this curve with an energy density that's closer to high nickel,

which is some of the better chemistries that are quite expensive

at close to the cost of lithium iron phosphate or LFP battery chemistry.

That will manifest in your cars as great cars built at lower costs with longer range.

So it's a net movement towards the good in terms of what you experience with your vehicle.

And then finally, we talked about some of our innovative work in robotics.

We have spun up a robotics center with talent from everywhere from Silicon Valley, California

to Detroit, Michigan and everywhere in between.

Where our people are working on collaborative robots.

These are robots that are designed not to operate within a human free zone,

as you've seen maybe in body shops and automotive work, but collaboratively alongside humans.

To take on some of the repetitive and ergonomically challenging tasks that those

humans perform and actively participate with them,

with production associates in the production of our vehicles.

Allowing our people to focus on the craftsmanship,

on the places that they add real value to that car.

Paroling those cobots out across all of our production facilities worldwide this year.

So a lot of really interesting work there will make them,

will generalize their capability set over time, make them capable of doing more over time.

All of the technology that you've highlighted today really talks about everything from

building the vehicle to experiencing the vehicle, that whole sort of through line.

And when you think about what you and other executives said today during the presentation,

it's this idea of how GM continues to rethink itself,

how it makes its vehicles, what even the vehicle is.

And how does all of that come together?

I think in maybe just the necessity of this moment and why it's important to

begin to think about advancing in technology that way.

What kind of differential does that give you?

Great question.

I would characterize the current environment as fluid, right?

Be that regulatorily, trade policy, consumer preferences, technology growth.

There are a lot of ways the world is changing underneath our feet.

The best way to adapt to that change is to build an agile company.

One that responds quickly to what comes.

One of the best ways to drive agility in a company, in an industry

that is so dependent on both hardware and software,

is to abstract the software from the hardware to the degree that you can.

And a big part of that comes in the new electric vehicle architecture we've developed.

It allows us to move hardware at the pace of hardware,

and software at the much faster pace of software to adapt, to learn, and to grow, and to get better.

So we have to stay agile.

And that's a big part of what you see from GM right now.

I think it sometimes characterizes something other than agility.

Sometimes it's perceived as though it's indecisive.

The way I'd characterize the decisions we've been making

over the last several months as the world has changed,

they've been quick, they've been quite decisive,

and they've left us in a really good position for taking on the future.

If EV adoption picks up rapidly,

we've got an extraordinary product portfolio of over 12 vehicles

that's growing at a rate that no one else is in EVs.

And we are not resting on our laurels there.

We are actively developing the next generation of electric vehicles

off of these LMR battery chemistries that we talked about,

off of a new electrical architecture,

bringing together evolution in what we're doing on the vehicle architecture and design as well.

So we're not standing still.

We're moving pretty quickly to stay abreast of these changes.

But at the end of the day, the word that I've used with the team at GM

has really been one of spring-loading.

We have to be spring-loaded for wherever these industries take us,

whether that's evolutions in AI, whether it's evolution in batteries,

changes in consumer preferences, changes in regulatory regimes.

We need to be prepared to take on and win in the automotive world, no matter what happens.

You mentioned the new electrical architecture and the central computing system.

There's a lot of talk and discussion about software-defined vehicles

and how important that's going to be.

But it's also really complex and challenging to do.

GM has looked at this for 2028.

But when you think about what that's going to enable GM to do,

as far as faster connectivity, faster update ability,

even just potential revenue applications that haven't even been identified yet,

why is that so critical for GM to be pursuing?

And what's that really going to bring to consumers, to the company,

by having that available?

At a macro level, it's this pace of change, is really what I'd emphasize.

The creation of a centralized computing system allows us much more

ability to update the software that's in the vehicles,

from where previously they were distributed across ECUs all across the vehicle.

We had to work through a supplier base, and it was much slower and more painful.

What it also did is, when you have a distributed computing architecture,

it makes every vehicle something of a snowflake from a software perspective.

And it makes updating, keeping everything at the same level

in terms of performance and capability really difficult.

The centralization changes that.

It makes our entire vehicle portfolio look very similar to one another

from a software perspective.

And what that allows us to do is develop a core set of

foundational capabilities or functionality,

adapt it with very minor tweaks to specific vehicles that it controls,

and then roll it out fleet-wide.

So what you'll see is a much more agile software development process

based on these electrical vehicle architectures.

What you'll also see, as a function of that,

because we can target these updates,

we'll start to roll out services much more quickly, right?

We talked about our AI assistant.

As we roll that out, we'll also roll out kind of other functions

that will surprise and delight you,

well beyond point of purchase of your vehicle.

Finally, there are ways that your life will improve

with these architectures that you may never notice.

I'll give you an example of this.

In some of our vehicles, we use magnetic suspension, damping suspensions.

The response time of a magnetic suspension really matters.

And it matters in ways you probably won't expect.

Except subconsciously.

How does that road feel?

How tired am I at the end of a trip?

That response time between the accelerometer at the wheel

that picks up the fact that there was a pothole,

and that passing through a computer or an ECU somewhere,

and getting back to an actuator that can change the suspension to adapt for it,

really, really matters.

And with our new electrical architecture, we've cut it by a factor of 10, right?

So a response that previously would have taken on the order of 10 milliseconds

takes less than a millisecond

to get all the way from the accelerometer all the way back to the actuator.

You'll never notice that.

And if I hadn't said that, most of the world would never know it.

But there are all these little things happening behind the scenes

where the innovations we're making will improve your life,

your experience with our cars,

in ways that will just feel like a better life, but you don't know why.

You're a little less tired at the end of that trip.

That road feels a little less bumpy.

Maybe they repaved it.

Or maybe I'm just in an OGM vehicle.

One of those things, I think, building on that,

that you talked about today as well, I think that gets at that idea,

is the eyes-off system.

You know, Super Cruise today, eyes on, hands off.

Taking it to eyes-off is definitely a big step.

It is.

It's very small, the number of automakers that have that level three technology in the market.

I don't think anybody does.

I know Mercedes does, but it's a limited...

Yeah, I mean, okay.

So low speeds, traffic jams.

And you're looking at highway...

We're going for something more than this, right?

We're developing a...

Your vehicle is self-driving on the highway.

And really, how do you think about both, I think, the opportunity

and maybe also the risk of taking a leading role in that

as opposed to, you know, kind of a fast follower type situation?

Yeah, we're going to develop and deploy as quickly as we can do safely.

Trust really, really matters here.

If you want to play the long game in autonomy, you roll out incrementally and slowly.

I think that thesis has proven out very well for GM historically.

700 million miles, hands-free miles have been driven with Super Cruise

without a single accident attributed to the technology.

That's trust you can't buy, right?

That's a true foundation for people having confidence in the system that we're building.

What Cruise developed in their development tools or validation infrastructure,

a lot of their core IP is also very value-agreed to what we're building here.

So GM is starting from a position of tremendous strength in self-driving development.

And by juxtaposing and combining the best of both of these worlds,

we're bringing together teams that understand what broad-scale deployment

in hundreds of millions of miles and millions of consumer cars looks like.

And on the other side, what development of state-of-the-art

machine learning techniques for autonomous driving really have to be.

You can hear GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson's full conversation

with our own Lindsay Van Hulley on the latest episode of the Automotive News

Shift podcast that's available now wherever you get your podcast.

That's Daily Drive for today.

I'm Kellan Walker.

Thanks to Automotive News Executive Producer Jake Neer, as well as our own Lindsay Van Hulley

and Jack Walsworth for their reporting for today's podcast.

You can get the latest news on tech and innovation,

supply chains, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.

Come back tomorrow for a conversation with Techeon CEO Jay Vijayan.

I feel everything is tracking well.

When the time is right, we will think about going public.

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Send us an email at dailydriveatautonews.com or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.

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Oct. 27, 2025 | EV sales to plunge in October; GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson

About this episode

Chevrolet Vegas

destination charge

half-ton pickup

Ford

Dodge Ram

MSRP

destination fee

transportation costs

import tariffs

GM

supercruise

lithium manganese rich

Dacia Breaks

differential

electrical architecture

software-defined vehicles

centralized computing system

ECUs

magnetic suspension

level three technology

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