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Happy Friday and welcome back to Critical Materials, your go-to source for the news driving the future of transportation.

On today’s docket: GM CEO Mary Barra could pick an EV and autonomy pioneer as her successor. A period of wild EV sales growth is over in the U.S. And, despite the bad vibes in the EV world, one solid-state battery startup plans to go public next year. 

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25%: GM’s Mary Barra Eyes A Successor

2026 Cadillac Escalade IQ

Photo by: Patrick George

Sterling Anderson, the former Tesla executive spearheading General Motors’s forays into new technologies, is in the running to be the automaker’s next CEO. 

Anderson joined GM in June as its chief product officer after several years at Aurora Innovation, the autonomous trucking startup he cofounded in 2016. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Anderson is a prime candidate to succeed 63-year-old GM CEO Mary Barra and run the whole show.

Here’s what Bloomberg found out: 

The understanding when he was hired, according to people familiar with the matter, was that if Anderson can satisfy Barra’s demand for him to bring cutting-edge software and self-driving technology to GM cars, he has a good shot at succeeding her.

A General Motors spokesperson said that any discussion of a future role for Anderson beyond chief product officer is “premature and speculative.”

As Bloomberg’s David Welch tells it, GM has tasked Anderson with injecting its cars with beefed up computing power and better software. He’s also on the hook to push forward its eyes-off driving efforts, develop revenue-boosting subscription features and make GM’s EVs profitable. 

In other words, everything that will define the winners and losers in the car business for years to come. So it makes sense that GM is strongly considering tapping an outsider like Anderson to lead. He has deep expertise in autonomous vehicles and ran the Model X and Autopilot projects at Tesla. 

But transforming a giant, established automaker like General Motors won’t be easy. And it’s already had serious stumbles on its path from traditional combustion vehicles to whatever’s next. It shut down its Cruise robotaxi division a year ago after a serious crash. Waymo has since been on a relentless expansion push. Its software-update game is still far behind that of new-school players like Tesla, and the Chevy Blazer EV had deep software issues at launch. 

Plus, GM has had trouble holding onto Silicon Valley talent lately. Its heads of AI and software departed recently. Anderson told Bloomberg he’s well aware that there’s a risk of being rejected and that he’s trying to make changes “surgically.” 

“You simply cannot afford to break a company and hope to pull the pieces back together at a company like General Motors,” he said. 

50%: EV Growth Set To Stall In 2025

The Tesla Model Y.

Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs

We all know this was a topsy-turvy year for EV sales. People rushed to buy electric cars this summer and fall before the EV tax credit expired, leading to a record third quarter. Once that ended on September 30, EV demand and market share in this country both dropped hard. Now we have a good sense of where electric vehicle sales will net out in 2025, courtesy of estimates from Cox Automotive out this week.

After years of incredible growth, U.S. EV sales are on track to fall slightly this year, the firm says. Preliminary data indicates that 230,000 electric cars will be sold in Q4, a 46% drop from Q3 and a 37% decline year-over-year. The electric share of the car market dropped to 5.7% in the quarter.

For the full year, Cox is projecting a 2.1% decline in EV sales. Last year, Americans bought a record 1.3 million electric vehicles. This year, Cox expects that to fall to around 1.275 million. 

“Despite Q3’s record performance, the sharp Q4 pullback resulted in an overall year-over-year decline,” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, Cox’s director of industry insights, said on a Wednesday conference call. “The year was defined by extreme volatility driven by policy changes.”

It’s not a huge drop. But it’s a notable shift, especially when you look at the trajectory of EV sales over the last several years.

In 2020, about a quarter-million new EVs hit the road in the United States. As more and more electric options came online and awareness took off, sales jumped to 488,000 in 2021, 810,000 in 2022 and 1.2 million in 2023, according to Cox. Last year, even as the EV industry hit speed bumps, full-year sales grew by over 7%. 

Expect things to look rocky for the foreseeable future, as carmakers adjust their strategies and react to the new normal.

“We expect continued market adjustment, as consumers and dealers recalibrate to the new pricing reality without federal incentives,” Valdez Streaty said. 

75%: Factorial Is Going Public, With Plans To Launch Solid-State Batteries By 2027

Stellantis Factorial Solid-State Battery

Photo by: Stellantis

The solid-state battery startup Factorial plans to go public via a SPAC next year, it announced on Thursday. The deal values the Massachusetts-based startup at $1.1 billion and would give it an initial $100 million to keep developing its next-generation battery technology. 

Factorial’s CEO, Siyu Huang, told The New York Times that the deal is “an inflection point in the company’s commercialization” and that it could help the company bring solid-state batteries to the car market by 2027. 

In theory, solid-state batteries could solve virtually all of the challenges of current lithium-ion technology by offering better safety, faster charging times and greater energy density. But they have yet to graduate from the lab into the real world in any meaningful way. Mercedes-Benz put Factorial cells in a prototype EQS sedan this year, and Stellantis plans to do the same with some Dodge Charger Daytona demonstrator vehicles in 2026.

We’ll have to see if Factorial’s new investment can help get its technology over the line before rivals.

100%: Do We Really Need Solid-State Batteries? 

The lithium-ion batteries that are in cars today are consistently getting better and cheaper. So does the world really need the solid-state moonshot?

Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com

[Updated Friday 12/19 11:30 AM PT with comment from General Motors]