G.M. Hopes Electric Cars and New Businesses Will Help Double Its Revenue

WARREN, Mich. — General Motors has been spending billions of dollars in the last few years to electrify its cars and trucks, as it tries to catch up to Tesla.

Now the company, which has said it aims to stop selling gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, is beginning to reveal how big it expects this bet will pay off.

The automaker said on Wednesday that it aims to roughly double its annual revenue by 2030, to about $280 billion. It is counting on new electric trucks and cars for much of the growth while adding new revenue streams from software and services.

“When you look at all the investments we have been making for five years plus, that’s what positions us to really be in execution mode,” G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, told reporters at its technical center north of Detroit during a daylong presentation to investors.

While it expects modest growth in sales of gasoline-powered vehicles, electric cars are “a tremendous growth opportunity,” she said. G.M. also hopes to develop ride-hailing services that use autonomous cars, create insurance products and expand its defense contracting work.

“That will really allow us to get that doubling effect in revenue,” Ms. Barra said.

If G.M.’s strategy has a target, it is Tesla, the dominant maker of electric cars and the most valuable automaker in the world by far. Tesla’s market capitalization, almost $800 million, is about 10 times G.M.’s.

In the three months that ended in September, Tesla delivered 241,000 cars around the world. That’s significantly more than G.M. sells in an entire year.

Ms. Barra didn’t mention Tesla in her presentation but made clear that G.M. was gunning for the upstart automaker. “We want to be No. 1 in E.V. market share in the United States,” she said.

Ford Motor, Volkswagen and other established automakers are also investing billions of dollars to develop electric vehicles. Ford started selling the Mustang Mach-E, an electric sport utility vehicle, this year, and appears poised to beat G.M. to the market with an electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, which will go on sale next spring.

Several start-ups are also hoping to sell electric cars. Among them are Rivian, which started making an electric pickup truck last month, and Lucid Motors, which says it will start selling a luxury electric sedan this month.

In its presentation, G.M. provided a glimpse at an electric version of its popular Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. The truck will feature a glass roof and be capable of steering with all four of its wheels, not just the front two, the company said. Executives would not say when it will go into production.

The electric Silverado will be built at G.M.’s Hamtramck plant in Detroit, alongside a GMC Hummer electric S.U.V., which the company plans to begin selling by the end of this year. G.M. will add the Cadillac Lyriq, an electric S.U.V., next year.

It also said it was working on a new version of its Super Cruise driver-assist system that will allow hands-free driving on local roads and recognize traffic lights and stop signs. Called Ultra Cruise, the new version will compete with Tesla’s Autopilot system.

Autopilot, which enables cars to steer, brake and accelerate on their own, has gained praise from Tesla’s fans but has also been found to fail to brake for stopped vehicles, leading to accidents and deaths. Federal regulators are investigating 12 cases in which Teslas operating on Autopilot crashed into police cars and other emergency vehicles.

G.M.’s Ultra Cruise is supposed to be released in 2023 for use on two million miles of roads in the United States and Canada. Super Cruise currently works only on about 200,000 miles of major highways.

The company has said it plans to introduce 30 new electric vehicles around the world by 2025, including 20 in the United States.

To support its ambitions, G.M. plans to enable half of its plants in North America and China to to produce electric vehicles by the end of the decade. It is already converting five North American plants to make such cars, and is building two battery plants, in Lordstown, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tenn.

In a similar move, Ford recently said it would build three battery plants and a new electric truck plant in Kentucky and Tennessee.

G.M. is counting on new businesses for a large portion of its growth. The company is working to offer vehicles and other products to the American military, and is preparing to introduce electric delivery vans. It is also working to offer insurance through its OnStar navigation and crash-response service as well as a ride-hailing service provided by self-driving cars from Cruise, a subsidiary.

Cruise has been testing a driverless taxi service in San Francisco, where it is based. At the investor presentation, G.M. executives said they believed that an autonomous taxi service could eventually grow into a $50 billion business.

“We expect to be able to scale this business very rapidly,” said Dan Ammann, chief executive of Cruise.

G.M. expects to make more money from software and services because they typically have higher profit margins than cars.