When the Loudest Voices Go Quiet, Pay Attention

You run a business in Malaysia. You’ve got invoices to chase, staff to manage, and a WhatsApp full of customers asking for updates. A story about American carmakers and their electric vehicle strategy feels like it belongs in a different universe.

Hear me out. This story is not about cars. It is about how companies behave when the environment around them changes — and that behaviour holds a valuable lesson for every SME owner who has ever chased a trend, leaned on a single big client, or built their entire operation around one way of doing things.

TechCrunch, together with Hudson Labs, a financial research firm, analysed seven years of GM and Ford earnings calls. Their finding: both automakers are talking about electric vehicles at a lower rate than they did before the pandemic — a sharp reversal for companies that once dedicated roughly a third of every investor call to EV talk (source).

TL;DR: GM and Ford made enormous bets on EVs, talked about them constantly for years, and then quietly redirected their focus when regulations, policy support, and market conditions shifted. The lesson for Malaysian SMEs is simple: watch what companies actually do, not what they say. Keep your operations flexible enough to change direction. And never let one big bet become your whole business.

What This Means

Let’s strip away the jargon. Every quarter, public companies like GM and Ford hold earnings calls where executives report results and answer investor questions. What they choose to talk about — and how much time they spend on it — is a direct signal of where the company’s focus lies.

GM went from more than 100 EV references on each of its last two earnings calls in 2020 to just 21 mentions on its most recent call covering Q2 2026. At its peak, EV talk represented roughly a third of the entire discussion. The company that once promised to go all-electric by 2035 now talks about aligning its EV capacity with regulatory policy — and spends its call time on software, services, and autonomous technology instead (source).

Ford followed a similar arc. It began pulling back from some of its biggest EV initiatives in mid-2024, well before the political shift that followed (source). Its CEO now talks about becoming “a major scaled competitor” in EVs in the future while focusing the present on its traditional truck lineup. A company spokesperson points to a new EV platform launching next year — but the message is clearly one of patience, not urgency.

Neither company has abandoned EVs. GM remains the second-largest EV seller in the US (source). But the urgency, the hype, and the sheer volume of talk are gone. And that shift happened before their EV businesses actually failed — because the signal changed first.

How This Applies to Malaysian SMEs

Here’s the part that matters for you. Malaysian SME owners have been through trend cycles for years. The rush to open a food delivery storefront. The scramble to list on every e-commerce platform. The pressure to “go viral” with short-form video. Each of these was real at some point. But the businesses that over-committed to any single one — that built their entire model around a platform’s rules, a single channel, or one hot product — felt the pain when the trend cooled.

Look at the pattern in your own industry. A restaurant owner who built everything around one delivery platform, then watched the platform’s rules and policies change overnight. A supplier who depended on a single anchor customer, then lost them when that customer’s own market shifted. You’ve seen it happen. You may have even lived through it. The GM and Ford story is the same pattern at a much bigger scale — except their size gave them room to absorb the change. For an SME, the same mistake can be far more serious.

Now ask yourself the uncomfortable question: what is your EV? What is the one bet your business depends on? It might be a single supplier, a single large client, a single product line, or a single marketing channel.

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