GM’s US Sales Lead Is Fading as Toyota’s Manufacturing Bet Pays Off
General Motors has near-record operating profits, a stock price up 50% year-over-year, and a finance chief who calls the company structurally sounder than at any point in its history.
Toyota is about to take the top sales spot in America for the first time in nearly a century. Both of those things are happening at the same time, and neither is a coincidence.
The gap is closing fast
Through July, GM sold roughly 100K more vehicles in the US than Toyota did, with each company near 1.5M total. That lead was 2-to-1 just twenty years ago.
Cox Automotive economist Charlie Chesbrough flagged a potential year-end flip as plausible back in June. The only thing keeping Toyota from already holding the top spot is a shortage of the redesigned RAV4, where demand is outrunning supply.
GM has held the title of America's best-selling automaker since 1931. The lone exception was 2021, when pandemic-era chip shortages capped GM's supply.
The current situation is different. This time, the gap is closing because of deliberate choices GM made about what to build and what to walk away from.
Opposite bets on what buyers want
GM's strategy traces back to its 2009 bankruptcy. Executives vowed to stop chasing volume through deep discounts, cheap loans, and rental-fleet offloading.
CEO Mary Barra has since killed sedans, exited Europe and India, shut down the Cruise robotaxi unit, and pulled back from EV battery joint ventures.
The result is an average transaction price of $52K and an adjusted operating profit of roughly $3.8K per vehicle, according to 2026 guidance figures.
Toyota's approach runs the other direction. It posted double-digit sales gains on the Corolla (starting at $24K) and Camry (starting at $30K) this year. Those are thin-margin models, but they're selling in volume.
Toyota also leaned heavily into hybrids while GM bet on all-electrics. EV sales industry-wide fell roughly 23% through the first half of 2026. Hybrid sales rose ~10% over the same period. GM's sole hybrid is a Corvette.
GM factories are falling behind
The most revealing stat in this story isn't market share or profit per vehicle. It's capacity utilization: how much of an automaker's installed factory footprint is actually producing vehicles.
Assembly costs are largely fixed, so a plant running at 73% spreads the same overhead across far fewer cars than one running at 92%.
GM's utilization sits at 73%. Toyota's is 91.9%. The uncomfortable detail is that GM was also at 73% in 2018, when it responded by closing Lordstown and three other facilities.
Consultants at LMC Automotive forecast at the time that GM would reach 86% utilization by 2026. Eight years and one closure round later, the number hasn't moved.
"It took 50 years, but maybe the naysayers were correct that Toyota is going to take over the US market."
Charlie Chesbrough, Cox Automotive
The Lansing, Michigan battery plant illustrates the structural issue clearly. GM built it as part of its Ultium joint venture with LG Energy Solution, then sold its stake in late 2024 and booked EV-related charges of $10.9B across the wider realignment.
LG kept the building, signed Toyota to a $1.5B battery order, and also lined up Tesla and grid-storage customers. The same facility that was worthless to GM is now running three product lines for three unrelated buyers.
The next move depends on timing
GM isn't standing still. The company committed $4B to move Chevrolet Equinox and Blazer production from Mexico to Kansas and Tennessee, and plans to convert its Orion, Michigan plant to gas-powered full-size SUVs starting in early 2027.
Barra's stated target is more than 2M US-built vehicles annually. Capital spending guidance runs $10B to $12B.
Toyota is also spending, but on different things. It opened a $13.9B battery plant in Liberty, North Carolina in late 2025 and committed $800M at its Georgetown, Kentucky facility to prepare for battery-electric production while simultaneously raising Camry and RAV4 output.
GM's plan relocates production it already has across a border to reduce tariff exposure. Toyota's spending adds capacity in segments GM exited.
Whether that distinction matters depends on one thing: whether GM's factory utilization climbs above 80% when Orion, Fairfax, and Spring Hill come online in 2027.
If it does, the margin story holds. If it doesn't, the company will have spent a decade getting smaller without getting more productive.